2) Questions, clarifications and serious rebuttals and discussions are welcomed.
3) Only comments that are germane to the post will be approved. Posts that only contain links to inappropriate, irrelevant or commercial sites will be deleted.
4) No flames, profanity, ad hominen comments, or you said/he said type arguments.
5) As stated in the blog description, no discussions of non-scientific subjects will be allowed.

von Storch and Zorita did not replicate the MBH98 methodology in key respects. In particular, their paper indicates that they did principal components on the correlation matrix of short-centered data, where as MBH98 did singular value decomposition (SVD) on the short-centered data matrix itself. The VZ procedure simply does not generate hockey stick shaped PC1s and cannot be used to test the impact of the MBH98 methodology.

Secondly, VZ endowed their pseudoproxies with much stronger correlations to gridcell temperature than exist in the controversial North American tree ring network. They assumed a minimum correlation of 0.3, whereas the 15th century MBH98 tree ring network has an average correlation to gridcell temperature of ~0.08 (with relative strong average correlation to precipitation.)

The MBH98 PC methodology is actually not a “principal components” methodology as defined by Preisendorfer [1988], which requires the use of time-centered data and explicitly excludes de-centered data (page 26).

VZ did not analyze the impact of the MBH98 method on MBH98 proxies and, since their replication of MBH98 methods was flawed, does not show that problems with MBH98 PC methodology did not matter.

Sometime after this posting, realclimate posted a comment accusing McKitrick and I of being "politically motivated". Posting at realclimate is a little thing. I was once involved in trying to detect a business fraud many years ago. A friend told me that to look for evidences of dishonesty in little things, as someone who is dishonest in big things will also be dishonest in little things. In passing, realclimate was able to locate and post URLs for versions of the VZ and Huybers Comments, but was seemingly unable to do so for our Replies.

So I ask the question again: is Gavin Schmidt honest about welcoming "serious discussions and rebuttals" at realclimate? About being in favor of openness in climate science? Or even about my being allowed to post at realclimate?

Maybe Tim Lambert will step up and criticize realclimate this time at his own blog. noone should get mad at me for raising the question. As Jack McCoy says on Law and Order, they did it to themselves.

Update . Oct. 31, 2005:
The post shown above was posted to realclimate on Friday, Oct. 28 at 9.18 a.m. Later that day, other posts were accepted, including one at 6:03 pm that accused us of being “politically motivated”‘?.

I waited a full business day to see what transpired and, on Saturday morning, I re-visited realclimate and my post had still had not been accepted. On a previous occasion, a post to realclimate, which I believed to have been on-topic and free of any ad hominem or other disqualifying attributes, had been rejected and I came to the conclusion that the same thing had happened once again.

As a result, on Saturday morning, I posted the above thread, in which I asked questions about the authenticity of Gavin’s commitment to “welcoming serious discussion and rebuttal”‘?, to openness in climate science and to a prior statement that I would be allowed to post at realclimate. While the questions were pointed, I carefully did not make any allegations, as I realize that there is always a possibility of an innocent explanation even in puzzling circumstances.

On Sunday, Oct 30 at 5:28 p.m., in comment # 51 at realclimate, in response to a question as to why my comment (now #44) had been disallowed, Gavin said

All comments pass through a filter. Most pass through immediately, some are caught for later assessment. This is stated plainly when comments are made. Approval depends on people seeing the comments and deciding to let them through, commenting on them or disallowing them for various reasons (as stated in the comment policy). Sometimes this takes time if people are busy or a response is deemed neccesary, thus comments sometimes appear ‘out of order’, particularly at weekends or when we are busy. This is unfortunate but can’t be helped.

Later that day (Oct 30 ~ 6 p.m.), Gavin accepted the above comment (now posted up as realclimate #44 and bearing the realclimate date-time stamp of Oct. 28 9:18 a.m.)

I am pleased to learn that the posting delays for my post were simply due to it being the weekend and not due to any intent on Gavin’s part to suppress “serious discussion or rebuttals”‘?. However, I am sure that Gavin will understand why I asked these questions based on the information available to me. Now that Gavin has answered these questions, I apologize for any embarrassment caused to Gavin by my raising these questions and look forward to participating in a “serious discussion”‘? of the topics raised in this post and have posted a further contribution to this topic at realclimate.

Update: Nov. 3 – The issues with realclimate posting appear to be not simply due to “weekend problems”. As noted below, while a couple of my posts have appeared, realclimate has suppressed several posts, which were on-topic and “serious” discussions of the theme of the post. The question remains unanswered.

Gavin, your statement: “throw it out completely, it still makes no difference” is not correct. The following longer version of his statement that you made recently is also not correct:

“The removal of the Gaspe series, or indeed of all the Bristlecone pine trees as well, has a minimal effect ( ~0.05 deg C) on the reconstruction as long as you include consistent numbers of PCs as described in the Dummies Guide. This is most clearly seen in the upcoming W&A paper in Climatic Change where they specifically go into these details (sorry I can’t post the figure).”

The above post was deleted leaving only the following record at realclimate:

Gavin, your statement….[redacted]

[Response: Absent a public apology regarding your remarks about my ethics, I will not be drawn into a personal discussion with you. Discussion regarding upcoming papers is best left to after they have appeared. -gavin]

On Oct 31 at 8 am, I submitted an explanation of the dispute, accepting Schmidt’s explanation of the dispute together with the requested apology posted up here at CA . Schmidt rejected the post even though it contained the requested apology (bolded below).

On Friday, Oct. 28 at 9.18 a.m., I made an on-topic post (now #44) in reply to claims made here about our work. Later that day, other posts were accepted, including one that accused us of being “politically motivated”.

I waited a full business day to see what transpired and, on Saturday morning, I re-visited realclimate and my post had still had not been accepted. On a previous occasion, a post to realclimate, which I believed to have been on-topic and free of any ad hominem or other disqualifying attributes, had been rejected and I came to the conclusion that the same thing had happened once again.
As a result, on Saturday morning, I posted a comment at my own blog, http://www.climateaudit.org, in which I outlined the chronology and asked questions about the authenticity of Gavin’s commitment to “welcoming serious discussion and rebuttal”, to openness in climate science and to a prior statement that I would be allowed to post at realclimate. While the questions were pointed, I carefully did not make any allegations, as I realize that there is always a possibility of an innocent explanation even in puzzling circumstances.

On Sunday, Oct 30 at 5:28 p.m., in comment # 51, in response to a question as to why my comment (now #44) had been disallowed, Gavin said that all comments are filtered, that “most pass through immediately, some are caught for later assessment” and that “approval depends on people seeing the comments and deciding to let them through, commenting on them or disallowing them for various reasons (as stated in the comment policy). Sometimes this takes time if people are busy or a response is deemed neccesary, thus comments sometimes appear ‘out of order’, particularly at weekends or when we are busy. This is unfortunate but can’t be helped.”

Later that day, Gavin accepted the comment (now posted up as #44 and bearing the date-time stamp of Oct. 28 9:18 a.m.)I am pleased to learn that the posting delays for my post were simply due to it being the weekend and not due to any intent on Gavin’s part to suppress “serious discussion or rebuttals”. However, I am sure that Gavin will understand why I asked these questions based on the information available to me. Now that Gavin has answered these questions, I apologize for any embarrassment caused to Gavin by my raising these questions and look forward to participating in a “serious discussion” of the topics raised in this post.

As I mentioned in the redacted post:

Gavin, your statement: “throw it out completely, it still makes no difference” is not correct. The following longer version of his statement that you made recently is also not correct:

“The removal of the Gaspe series, or indeed of all the Bristlecone pine trees as well, has a minimal effect ( ~0.05 deg C) on the reconstruction as long as you include consistent numbers of PCs as described in the Dummies Guide. This is most clearly seen in the upcoming W&A paper in Climatic Change where they specifically go into these details (sorry I can’t post the figure).” http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=172#comment-3626

If you remove the bristlecones and Gaspe, you don’t get a hockeystick – as we’ve said for sometime. If you let the bristlecones in through the back door e.g. by using more PCs in the North American network under a centered calculation; or by abandoning any attempt at regional balance e.g. by making 20% of all proxies in the world bristlecone series, you can get a hockeystick shape. We go through all this in our E&E article.

What is very clear is that MBH98 is not robust to the presence/absence of all dendroclimatic indicators, as was claimed (since it is not robust to the presence/absence of bristlecones).

Re #59: Lynn, I have not expressed any views about whether or not we have broken through a “noise barrier”. In the papers in controversy, I argued that no conclusions can be drawn as to 20th century uniqueness based on MBH98 for a variety of reasons, including their flawed PC method, the interaction between their PC method and flawed proxies (bristlecones) and the failure of the reconstruction to pass statistical cross-validation tests. I am dubious about other multiproxy papers as well, but have not published on them to date.

On Nov 2 at 9 am, I submitted the following comment noted below here which was rejected:

A point about Huybers’ Comment, to which we had a very precise Reply not discussed in the head post.
In our GRL article, we pointed out that the MBH reconstruction failed important cross-validation tests (such as the R2 test, but not only the R2 test) and that these failures were unreported. There is no benchmark theory for RE significance. We argued that the seemingly high RE statistic in MBH98 was “spurious” – using the term “spurious” in the statistical sense of Granger and Newbold [1974] and Phillips [1986], not in an argumentative sense and showed that the biased PC1s could be used to create “reconstructions” which had high RE and low R2 statistics.

Huybers argued that this model of a spurious RE mechanism did not replicate a re-scaling procedure, now known to be in MBH98 from the source code release. Huybers did some new simulations, purporting to show that the benchmark should be a low one, rather than the high benchmark that we had proposd.

In our Reply, we pointed out that Huybers had not implemented other important aspects of MBH procedure. We re-did our RE simulations, applying information from the source code, and once again obtained a high RE benchmark.
The most important point is the failure of the cross-validation R2 statistic. We have never argued (contrary to some characterizations of our work) that the cross-validation R2 statistic is sufficient for statistical significance; however, we do argue that it is necessary.

Re #89: The result is not robust. The various supposedly “independent” reconstructions are not in fact independent either in authorship or proxy selection. There are important defects in each such study individually with proxy quality and robustness with respect to outlier results.

[Response: At the moment, this looks like wild assertion / mud slinging. Given that the various reconstructions are the same on the important points, it seeems that the major conclusions are robust. Asserting that everyone else is wrong and only you are right is implausible – William]

Re #90: William, the lack of independence in authorship in the majority of commonly-referenced multiproxy studies can be seen merely by inspecting the names of the coauthors: Briffa et al [2001] with coauthor Jones is obviously not “independent” in authorship from Jones et al [1998] with coauthor Briffa. Jones and Mann [2004] and Mann and Jones [2004] are not independent of the above two studies or of Mann, Bradley and Hughes [1998, 1999] or Bradley and Jones [1993], which are not independent of Hughes and Diaz [1994] or Bradley, Hughes and Diaz [2003]. Cook and Schweingruber provide common links to other studies. This is all a matter of public record. Beyond the multiproxy coauthorship, the various authors have often coauthored elsewhere. These are not “independent” authors in the way that this term is generally understood by the public.

Briffa himself has noted the overlap of proxies between studies. To pick one example, 13 of 17 proxies used in Jones et al [1998] are used directly in MBH98-99 and a 14th is used in its individual components. The flawed bristlecone/foxtail proxies are used repetitively: MBH98-99; Crowley and Lowery [2000]; Mann and Jones [2003], Jones and Mann [2004]; Esper et al [2002]. There are important defects in Briffa’s Polar Urals reconstruction which affects MWP results in MBH99; Crowley and Lowery [2000]; Jones et al [1998].

I am not putting forward an alternative “reconstruction”, which I am claiming to be the “right” one. I am pointing out the possibility of some systemic problems in the existing repertoire.

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> Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any
>> way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful
>> about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to
>> answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other
>> hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself.
>> We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or
>> not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any
>> comments you’d like us to include.
>>
>> You’re also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as
>> a resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put
>> forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We’ll use
>> our best discretion to make sure the skeptics dont’get to use the RC
>> comments as a megaphone…
>>
>> mike

Yes, I think from all the signs that RealClimate is stonewalling any message from a regular on this site. At least any who view your efforts positively. I tried posting a fairly simple post a few days ago and it never showed up. Several others here have had the same thing happen recently. So what they think they’re proving, I have no idea. Serious people will figure out what’s happening pretty soon anyway.

It might be interesting to see if any of the pro-Mann people dare to try posting a copy of your remarks (the scientific ones, I mean, not the complaints about them not appearing) and see if they appear, and if so what reply there is to them.

RC can make statements about their moderation policy until they’re blue in the face, but it’s very clear that they don’t want someone well informed like Steve from breaching their wall of silence around Michael Mann.

I would suspect that Michael Mann as the culprit, since he has fought long and hard to not mention this weblog on RC and never ever mention Steve’s or Ross’ names in any interview, except in conspiracy theory terms.

Fortunately, despite the number of authors, RC has very little to say in the field of actual science. But that’s OK as its been a political propaganda blog from day 1.

Gavin has in the past, been very temperate. And I was worried about your previous post about him. But if he won’t speak out on the constraining of your (cited) purely science related post, then he is part and parcel of the dishonesty.

I would really love it, if he did speak out.

P.s. Look at Peter being allowed to post here. What a welcome difference (and before someone says anything, I disagreed with JohnA’s heavy hand in the past and stuck up for “free Peter”.)

Well, Peter, while you’re boo, hissed a lot here, you messages are at least allowed, despite their lack of content. What excuse does RealClimate have for not posting messages which are on-topic, science based and not defamitory? And it’s not like it’s only one or two of us where it could be blamed on random errors or a conspiracy to make RC look bad. I KNOW I’m telling the truth and I have no doubt the others are too.

Peter said “I *guess* they just don’t want to get into what could easily become a row.”
Isn’t that the same as saying “I *guess* they just don’t want to defend their position against critical analysis.”?

I love double standards. They are so easy to spot because there’s two of them.

Re #18, nope it’s “I *guess* they just don’t want to get into what could easily become a row”. You know, like when I get described here as ‘wretched’ for simply trying to get a simple question answered.

Well, you are wretched, Peter. But we still love you. Which brings us back to Rodney King. Yes, you have the right bloke, but he’s famous for what he said after incident, “Why can’t we all just get along?” A bit ironic as he’d been fighting the police who were trying to arrest him, which is what got him beat up in the first place, but the sentiment sounded nice so it’s somewhat of a cultural icon by now. But in the present context it fits wonderfully that people who have been ‘beating up’ on Steve don’t want him to say anything which would be unpleasant.

In passing, realclimate was able to locate and post URLs for versions of the VZ and Huybers Comments, but was seemingly unable to do so for our Replies.

I posted a comment to RealClimate about this – it was up briefly and there was a reply. I posted again, with links to your replies. This post did not appear and in addition, my original post and the reply to it were deleted.

You’re not prevented from posting here. Why are all the rest of us prevented from posting there? You’re the one who suggest it might be because they thought things would turn nasty. But there hasn’t been nastyness here despite provocation by you, John Hunter, and others. I can’t speak as to whether there’s anyone blocked from posting here, but certainly there’s no prevention of material points being made as if there had been they’d have been posted or referenced on RC.

I too have submitted skeptical posts that never appeared. In several cases more or less the same point was later made by someone else, but with a supportive slant. The “science only” claim is hypocritical. Realclimate is larded with extreme political comments, especially Bush bashing. Inhofe is routinely referred to as “Inoaf,” etc. It might be fun to collect a representative sample. I don’t object to political slander, just to the hypocrisy.

Aside from the hypocrisy of realclimate posting policy, if you slag someone on your blog (as realclimate had done to us), simple equity requires that they be given a chance to respond. As an example of this, we criticized Tim Lambert here and, even when the after-discussion became pretty boring and repetitive, I took the position that, because we’d criticized him, we had an obligation to let him air his side of the story even when other people were sick of it. I would never think of censoring a Hockey Team member who wanted to speak up here.

Mann won’t come here. His whole gig is built around acting like he is more prestigious than the people criticising his work. I’ve never seen him engage in a full-up debate on content (for instance as you have when I’ve pecked or pushed at you.) And I’m several notches down from you in understanding of the math or the field. But you still engage on the issues if I raise a halfway decent point. It blows me away that Mann who has a mathematical physics background does not WANT to get into a discussion of statistical nuances. He SHOULD enjoy that sort of thing!

Is he weak intellectually (thus covering up for it). Or is he capable, but just tendentious? Or a snob? I really would be interested in what he is like.

Good points but if something is blindingly obvious, like AGW is supposed to be, then why is it necessary to develop such arcane statistical analyses to prove it?

And if the scientific conclusion is so sensitive to statistical procedure, then I would look at the assumptions defining that theory, rather than getting bogged down in yet another statistical analysis to prove or disprove it.

I think #27 and #28 make points, some rather gruffly. #29 ends up laughably prejudiced, and Louis? Well, Louis is just Louis🙂.

I will say, fwiw, if I were running RC I’d try letting Steve post, if only to silence a few here. But, what would it achieve? Would minds change? Mine? I think I’m right to say we’ve just seen the warmest Sept/Oct on record (unless something amazing happens tomorrow anyway), most of Europe is the same, the Arctic ice is a shadow of it’s former self, globally it loooks to be at least top two for warmth (and no 1998 El Nino). I’ll take some convincing – but I do listen.

I went there and looked at one thread in which you and he were the main participants. But unlike RC, you were allowed to say what you want. Are you saying that He or others keep anything contraversal off RC but are tasked to try rebutting Steve or his surrogates on less known sites?

BTW, it is instructive to read the various attempts by William and others to introduce false positions for Steve. You manfully correct their misconceptions but they don’t really answer your corrections but move on to new misconceptions. (This thread is one concerning, among other things, obtaining hockeysticks from random noise.)

At any rate, AFAIK, William is welcome to come here and get his clock cleaned if he wants.

Dear Dave, do you mean our discussions with William on his blog?🙂 You may think that I was allowed to say anything, but it’s only because you don’t know how many comments have actually been erased.🙂 Also, you don’t know the stories on Wikipedia that led to parole for William, and so forth. He really likes to censor things. The other guys are, compared to Connolley, passive and peaceful zeroes.🙂

It is with extreme distaste that I am responding to this post. Impugning my integrity on the basis of a delay in approving comments in the moderation queue is beyond the bounds of normal conduct and I find it highly offensive. The contributors at RC are not full time employees and have actual work that they need to do. You and your concerns are actually not our highest priority, and particularly in the wake of this post, are unlikely to become so. Absent a public apology, I have no further interest in communicating with you.

Gavin, while that might explain the situation, unfortunately it doesn’t fit the facts. Many, many other comments were somehow processed during that time. If your explanation is the truth, how did those other comments get processed and Steve’s did not?

Just to let folks know, courtesy of Joshua Corning, Steve’s post finally made it on to RealClimate (apparently the mods found time to let Joshua post in their busy schedule, but not Steve)

William C makes a stab at answering, but confuses himself. He asks where the temperature correlation comes from – I’d assumed it was based on the correlation to temperature during the calibration period, and if I can work that much out William (as an “expert”) presumably should have been able to figure that much out. But his first attempt has to be better than his “so what?” soundbite – I think William is struggling with the technicalities of Mann’s methodology.

Nothing else is addressed, but then at the end of the comment Rasmus complains about Steve’s comments on wavelet analysis on Moberg. Talk about off topic! My guess is this is they couldn’t directly criticise Steve’s comment (other than William’s fairly poor attempts) so they trawled the entire site to find something to criticise. This topic is one that Steve openly admitted online that was outside of his field of expertise. And that was the best example of “mumbo-jumbo” he could come up with?

I’d like to see RealClimate engage in scientific debate at some point, but I’m not planning on holding my breath. They’ve gone to great lengths to stonewall and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

And just how long is this queue supposed to be, Gavin? I certainly know I waited 24-48 hours before saying anything and I still haven’t seen anything this morning. I know when I’d posted before it was no more than a few hours before an item was put through. I haven’t noted any great increase in the number of posts at RealClimate in the meantime. If anything there are fewer posts.

Maybe we need little beeper things like they give you in restraunts to let you know when your table is ready. In this case a simple automatically generated e-mail which says, “Thank you for your post on Real Climate. Because of the time it takes to examine messages for suitability please don’t complain about it not being posted / rejected before 11/2/05,” might do the trick.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen grown men (though I, obviously, reserve judgement re #39) falling over themselves quite so much in their desperation to condemn another. Amazing, and all thoroughly unedifying.

A previous post of mine discussed here http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=389 was never posted, despite Gavin specifically considering it. Other posts were processed while mine was in the queue. I made no allegations – I asked questions. There’s a difference. Would Joshua Corning’s post have been processed without raising the questions, I doubt it.

As to “normal bounds” of realclimate conduct, if Gavin is offended, I presume that he will proceed to dissociate himself from realclimate author M.E. Mann, who made very specific assertions of dishonesty here http://www.natutech.nl/nieuwsDetail.lasso?ID=2565

Re: #44
In *this case*, a weekend is involved, so I think one must err on the side of publicly ascribing delays to incompetence (or lack of time) rather than malice. I think the title questioning Gavin’s honesty, while perhaps appropriate after a week had passed, instead comes off as an ad hominem and reflects poorly on this blog. It also neglects the fact that multiple authors control RC’s actions, not just Gavin. (However, I would expect that anyone of integrity would disassociate themselves from a site that repeatedly violated its own posting policy). Thus, I feel that Gavin is owed an apology for the specific title of this thread.

However, RC needs to answer for actions such as:
1) Disallowing scientific, non-political posts to RC. As with others described above, I have had this happen to a number of my own posting attempts.
2) Allowing Michael Mayson’s post (see #23 above), including a reply, and then arbitrarily deleting it later (I witnessed this and can’t think of any valid reason for it).
3) Still not allowing the post by Steve that is the subject of this thread.

The onus is on RC to back up its proclaimed posting policy with its deeds, or to publicly post its true posting policy.

In an attempt to clarify RC’s posting policy, I today submitted the following in response to William’s reponse to my post at RC:

Re: #48
William, you say that “As for the CA post… there seems a determined attempt to personalise this by some people which I think is regrettable.”

As I read it, this suggests that the Steve McIntyre post I referred to was disallowed because of the author’s identity, even though it was a scientific, and not political, post.
If so, it would seem useful to add that criterion to your posted comments policy. If not, could you please clarify why it was disallowed?

This kind of totally unscientific anedcdotal bs is so frequently used by the GW camp that it quite rightly tars you as lacking any kind of scientific integrity.

It reminds me of a conference I was involved in re: long term urban planning for climate change (my role was to review the climatic change literature). I was and am a sceptic, but was asked by the organizers, convinced GWs but nice guys, to pull my punches. I considered that until a hard scientist with a PhD stood up to speak. He lived in Dawson City in the Yukon. He opened by saying to 100 senior municipal officials from across the country: “I can assure you that (anthropogenic) global warming is real: it is raining in the Yukon in December, and the locals had never seen it before!” Quite apart from the fact that this can be explained by Rossby Waves and is not unusual, this is a totally unscientific pronouncement. He had only lived in the Yukon a couple of years and the locals he knew could only have been there a lifetime. It didn’t occur to him or he didn’t care that climatic cycles span multiple human lifetimes, so his sampling wasn’t exactly robust. Neither did it occur to him that it was unscientific to take anecdotal personal observations of one place on the surface of the planet for two or three years and extrapolate from that to long term trends in global climate.

Needless to say, when I got up to make my scheduled presentation, I took no prisoners.

Anyone who pulls these kinds of stunts is no scientist. You should be ashamed of yourself.

I have had three submissions that met their stated criteria, but disagreed with their beliefs, rejected also. Two other submissions that added a lot of data without taking a very obvious position were accepted. They can’t tolerate disagreement. They also use the old propaganda trick of publishing suggestions without evidence as if they were truth, eg, that volcanoes might have been the cause of the LIA. All in all it is a very biased site that only claims to seek truth. Actions do speak louder than words. Murray

Well, I’ve had posts apparently rejected by realclimate — but, when I’ve sent a “chaser” to them, I believe my contributions have always been posted. In such cases, I’ve put it down to what Gavin has called “a delay in approving comments in the moderation queue” — I didn’t have any problem with that.

However, during the time when I was posing a few simple and straightforward questions about Steve’s background to climateaudit, I had numerous posts ignored completely and numerous relevant sections snipped from “published” postings. It seemed that the liberal use of concepts like “ad hominems” can be a very effective censorship tool — and it also allows you to lay claim to the moral high ground …..

Actually the quality of the posts on RC that are allowed through are incredibly variable. Most are contentless and frankly boring. There are comments that are very interesting, with lots of interesting information.

There’s no explanation as to why some posts are let through on the nod and some must be delayed interminably. I think its due to the RC habit of replying directly into the comment – it slows down the comment to such an extent that the flow of comments is interrupted and makes it very difficult to follow.

Then there’s the question of why certain scientific posts are not posted at all – on a supposedly scientific blog, why can’t the Hockey Team allow difficult questions that they have no immediate answer to? What are they afraid of? Isn’t it in the nature of science to allow critical views to be aired?

I have asked climate scientists some tough questions, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised that when the scientist is sure of his ground, honest about the limitations of his method and the interpretation of his results, then there’s no question that has gone unanswered and no offence taken by me asking them.

The only comfort I can take from all of this is that the behavior of the RC authors is not widespread in the scientific community, even if their conclusions might be.

Armand – the post was posted early Friday morning. It was in the queue when the Vincentnathn comment was posted. The post times at realclimate seem to be the time of posting rather than the time of moderation approval. If so, then my post was not only in the queue at the time of the Vincentnathan posting, but was in the queue prior to the Vincentnathan post. So someone at realclimate handled the file and did not post it. They have a history in which they did not post a comment by me.

If someone can give me a plausible explanation as to how weekend problems could result in the observed chronology, I will consider that as an answer to my question? In terms of apologies, has anyone ever thought that I might be entitled to an apology from Mann for his outrageous comments to Natuurwetenschap? Maybe Peter H and John H (by the way, John H, it’s nice in a way to hear from you again) could turn their minds to why I am not entitled to an apology.

Just checked and none of my posts are up. The one that I showed here awhile ago and a couple others over last few days. Here’s what I’m posting now:

“William, the “so what” is that Mann did not explain how he performed his statistics adequately in his description of methods in his paper. Also, the so what is that as he is using an unapproved method, it is incumbent on him to check that his method does not produce artifacts.”

Let’s see if it makes it.

Gavin, I don’t buy for a minute that Steve’s post was just in normal queue. Several others had new posts after his. This is outrageous. If you are not personally responsible, you should disasocciate yourself from those who are.

Do you really wonder why you have gotten the cold shoulder from Realclimate? Let’s be realistic.

Posting to blogs, and contributing to congressional political theater is all good fun, but the real science takes place in the professional literature. Your challenge is to convince the scientific community that you have something relevant to contribute to the search for understanding the climate puzzle.

According to the Wall Street Journal article, you have failed to convince qualified climate scientists that your contribution to the debate has anything relevant and constructive to add. You have failed to make the case that your analysis of the statistical technicalities of one proxy study has any significance. Complaining about Gavin Schmidt’s “dishonesty” is a strategy to divert attention from the hard truth: you have made yourself unwelcome by virtue of your advocacy of a politically motivated agenda.

Your glee at the Barton witch-hunt should be a hint, even if your contribution to Barton’s politically motivated drama were the only evidence of your hostility towards climate scientists like Gavin Schmidt. I don’t wonder that your contribution to the debate should be unwelcome at Realclimate.

Re: #55
Steve, my *assumption* on how RC works is that they’ve got some filters that shunt any posts they might want to disallow into a purgatory for human processing, while others go straight through. Based on past experience, I would bet that these filters look for keywords and also look for certain names.

At the time you started this thread, it was possible to argue that your post, my posts, and others were held for “official” decisionmaking, while Lynn’s was passed through, perhaps automatically. However, as you note, they’ve now (within the past hour or so) posted your post as #42, making clear that you entered it before the posts by Sanderson & O’Sullivan, which appeared on RC yesterday (if not earlier), along with responses by both Gavin *and* William. In addition, the post by corning, which was simply a later repost of your post with a different author’s name, appeared on the site, again with RC comments, without your post appearing.
Based on this series of events, it seems we must conclude that RC staff (seemingly including Gavin and William) decided to hold your post while allowing through others, including one that was essentially a duplicate of your post.

Having said all that, this evidence wasn’t available at the time you started & named the thread; although we may all have our suspicions, I believe it’s most helpful to just lay out the facts and let the readers decide on others’ characters based on those facts. I still believe the title of this thread isn’t helpful, but that’s your call.

Having said all *that*, of course you are entitled to an apology from Mann for his comments. It saddens me to see a scientist act so churlishly, just as it saddens me to see Gavin’s apparent involvement in and/or condoning of the post censorship. Whatever others do, you have no need to stoop from a high level. Just keep interpreting events as evidence of incompetence rather than malice.

Yes the science is in the ‘official’ scientific literature. But what does that make RC? It must not be science according to your own definition. So why would RC be upset with Steve, since he has actually been published in the ‘scientific’ literature? And your phrase ‘you have failed to convince qualified climate scientists that your contribution to the debate has anything relevant and constructive to add’ is disingenuous at best. Those climate scientists who aren’t convinced is hardly the entire universe of climate scientists. Sure there are ones who aren’t convinced. But some are convinced that Steve’s findings are valid and important. The thing that unites the ones who complain (publicly) about Steve’s work is their linkage to the Hockey Team and its worldview.

Ok, moving on. Your name is familiar, but I’m not sure if you’re a working climate scientist or not. If you are, are you willing to discuss with Steve here the ins and outs of his actual scientific points or not? If not why not? Let’s see an actual member of the Hockey Team appear here and debate the scientific issues. I’m sure Steve would even allow such a member to throw out the first ball, so to speak, and be given a guest-post position.

Come on, warmers. Put up or shut up (well, you don’t actually have to shut up, but at least moderate the anti-McIntyre rhetoric.)

Re #43: The Moberg wavelet plots mentioned by rasmus are here http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=346#more-346. As Spence pointed out, I claimed no particlar expertise in wavelets and was working my way through the study. Rasmus mischaracterizes what I said – surprise, surprise. I did NOT say that the discrete wavelet analysis should be used. I provided plots using a discrete wavelet analysis on the basis that they would be more intelligible to this audience. I can’t imagine that anyone would disagree with this. I said in passing that a discrete wavelet approach seemed to be consistent with the annual data, but again did not say that it should be used.

Rasmus also criticizes climateaudit for a study on temperature by Michaels and McKitrick with which I had no connection.

Gavin, thanks for posting here. I still don’t buy that there was not some extra delay on Steve’s post. He’s also had previous posts not allowed. and several of my posts were not allowed. But some pretty non-content cheerleader posts got on no problem.

Gavin (thanks for allowing my comment and engaging with me in discussion):

A. Your comment does not address my point that it is encumbent on experimenters to properly describe their procedures in the literature so that readers can evaluate the implication. This goes double for non-standard procedures.

B. I read your cited RC rationale for how you “disproved” the effect of abnormal normalization:
1. The shown mean is a mean of tree series. It has no weighting for area. That’s like sampling 100 Democrats and 5 Republicans and basing your guess on the outcome of a presidential election on that survey. your sampling method is skewed. You need to do a fair sample or you need to weight by area (party, in the analogy).
2. Steve does not agree with your arguments for several reasons (and you have not engaged on those).
3. EVen if for some reason the “offcenter PCA method” worked with the particular, and I’m not acknowledging that it does, if it is a flawed method for general cases, you need to show how your case does not have those flaws. Or better yet, just use a normal area-weighted mean.
4. Steve has proven that the method can data mine for hockey sticks out of red noise. That it magnifies the effect of hockeystick signal. Given that, why use such a funky method? Better yet, completely open question: why was that offcenter method picked, vice conventional Preisendorfer methods?

C. Finally, this matter is still much in debate. Steve had peer-review accepted replies to the comments. You should read them and evaluate the suitability of his logic, points in engaging on this topic. You gotta read both sides…

P.s. I took out that part about “allowing me to post” as that might be snarky. (and I can just see them deleting the whole comment on the content, because of one teeny part that was snarko-construable.

“Please, let’s continue. You say that debate is welcomed in the policy for the blog. Don’t slam the door shut on the primary issue of controversy around. Let’s dig into the issue and the subissues.

You say that you’ve proven something. Then you say it doesn’t matter. Surely if you’ve proven it, it’s irrelevant if it doesn’t matter. Also if a technicality is wrong, you should acknowledge that (regardless of if you think it’s effect is minor).”

>> John Hunter, did Michael Mann call you dishonest? If he did, I expect that you would
>> insist on an apology and even threaten litigation. That’s the apology that I’m talking
>> about.

No, Steve, I don’t think I would “insist on an apology and even threaten litigation” — I might for a short while, but not after I’d applied a couple of neurons to the problem — there are more important things to do.

avin, your statement: “throw it out completely, it still makes no difference” is not correct. The following longer version of his statement that you made recently is also not correct:

“The removal of the Gaspe series, or indeed of all the Bristlecone pine trees as well, has a minimal effect ( ~0.05 deg C) on the reconstruction as long as you include consistent numbers of PCs as described in the Dummies Guide. This is most clearly seen in the upcoming W&A paper in Climatic Change where they specifically go into these details (sorry I can’t post the figure).” http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=172#comment-3626

If you remove the bristlecones and Gaspe, you don’t get a hockeystick – as we’ve said for sometime. If you let the bristlecones in through the back door e.g. by using more PCs in the North American network under a centered calculation; or by abandoning any attempt at regional balance e.g. by making 20% of all proxies in the world bristlecone series, you can get a hockeystick shape. We go through all this in our E&E article.

What is very clear is that MBH98 is not robust to the presence/absence of all dendroclimatic indicators, as was claimed (since it is not robust to the presence/absence of bristlecones).

Re #73: John H, glad to hear that. I thought that you and Richard Courtney had been in some sort of prolonged verbal brawl, but the threats may have been going the other way. (I’m OK with not having a reprise of the history of the brawl and for the purposes of this blog, I agree with your neurons.) But Gavin can’t give Mann a pass on his ridiculous letter to Natuurwetenschap and then have a hissy-fit when he’s called out on realclimate’s hypocritical posting policy. On the plus side, it looks as though they’ve been shamed into posting some adverse comments. It will be interesting to see how long this lasts. It must drive them crazy having to post up some adverse comments.

TCO, one of the unfortunate aspects about the VZ and Huybers comments is that they are distraction from the main game.

To my mind, the debate about centered and non-centered PCA is a sideshow. The long term Hockey Team tactic has been to dismiss this as an obscure statistical issue, and in the end it “doesn’t matter” because the proxies included in PC1 via the MBH procedure simply become PC4 via the M&M procedure. Then, post-hoc, Mann invokes Preisendorfer’s Rule N to justify now including PC4 in the reconstruction.

By far more important is the fact that either method (non-centered PCA or inclusion of PC4 by appeal to Rule N) are simply “trojan horses” for getting the bristlecones into the reconstruction.

The most compelling aspect of Steve’s replies to the GRL comments is the analysis that shows the contribution of the bristlecones to the hockeystick. No bristlecones = no hockeystick.
“Bristlecone” seems to be something of a dirty word over at realclimate. If you do a search on the site, the term is mentioned once, in the “dummies guide”. In that context, the issues are dismissed as they “were addressed in the followup paper MBH99 but the fact remains that including these data improves the statistical validation over the 19th Century period and they therefore should be included.” (Similarly, when M&M query the bristlecones they are accused of “throwing out data”).

I haven’t looked at MBH99 for a while, but my recollection is that they adjusted the bristlecone series, bizzarely, for the 19th century, when the growth spurt occurs in the 20th century (and explicitly ruled out by Graybill & Idso, who collected the data, as being temperature related).
(In passing, it would be great if Steve could post something about the treatment of the bristlecones in MBH99 if he hasn’t done so already).

Finally, it should be noted that the bristlecone series are included in most of the post MBH98 reconstructions that the feature in the “spaghetti graphs” employed to validate MBH98.
I know all this has been covered before, but I think everyone should keep in mind that the statistical argument in the end mostly boils down to the pre-eminence of a handful of high altitude North American tree-ring samples in the reconstruction of global temperature over the last thousand years.

In this context, it was extremely dissappointing for von Storch to simply put the bristlecones in the “further research” basket, as if this crucial issue shouldn’t have been addressed before MBH and others were happy to claim them as a valid proxy.

Peter,
I’m getting tired of hearing you pound the same old drum. Most people are convinced that global temps are going up, so there’s no argument there. Stop trying to make *that* the debate. The big questions are 1) How much is it going up, and more importantly 2) What is causing it. There are many natural climatic cycles that we already know of, and the current warming trend may just be part of one that we have not yet identified. You will have much more credibility if you keep your focus on these issues instead of throwing up the same old straw-man all the time.

I find it amazing that the hockey team is still trying to accuse Steve of “throwing out data”. It’s obvious that he only removes the bristlecode series from the analysis to show that the statistical technique used by Mann is not robust. I don’t have a degree in mathematics, yet even I understand that. This strikes me this as a type of straw-man argument, which is very unprofessional, IMHO.

Paul, small correction. It’s not about showing that the statistical technique is not robust, it’s about showing that the reconstruction is not robust to the presence/absence of bristlecones, regardless of technique.

That was my point in my earlier post – MBH98 is a sideshow of statistical weirdness, but at the end of the day, it’s the bristlecones on the main stage (with Gaspe among the supporting cast).

RE 79: your thunder is never stolen. I always appreciate your clear summaries; it helps me see what’s connecting. You must have been reading Ross’ mind. He’s suggested a special-purpose discussion on bristlecone adjustments. It’s a good idea for an article as it’s a nice, finite topic with rather a surgical outcome. We did some calculations a while back showing the results if you did a CO2 adjustment according to Graybill and Idso – rather than the fantasy in MBH99. Needless to say, the hockey stick disappears.

The way that we discovered the bristlecones is actually an interesting story because it connects to the PC issue in a nice way. In our first Nature submission, we’d discovered the weird PC methodology and pointed out that the top-weighted series Sheep Mountain got 390 times the weight of the least weighted series (not being aware of bristlecones at the time or even cluing in that Sheep Mountain was a bristlecone site.) Mann’s response was to say – there’s nothing wrong with this weighting of Sheep Mountain, there are 14 other series with weights of over 0.2 (or something like that.) So that was a bit of a red flag: what were the other series. You could locate site codes for the top weighted series in the EOF1 at Mann’s FTP site, which I looked up. I then manually looked up the locations of the codes at WDCP; I still didn’t twig right away to the fact that they were all bristlecones. At some point, I realized that I’d seen more than one of the names in Graybill and Idso and so I started cross-checking the sites back and forth and, lo and behold, all the top-weighted series were in the Graybill and Idso schedule. The irony of Mann’s hockey stick being made up of Sherwood Idso’s CO2 fertilization series was simply breathtaking. It’s amazing how obtuse people are about realizing this, or how successful the realclimate disinformation is (“throwing away data”.) It was also fun to decode the CENSORED file : there is no site information on the CENSOREED file. But there was just enough information on the site to be able to deduce that the 20 sites missing in the CENSORED file were the bristlecones.

When Gavin claims over a realclimate that it doesn’t matter whether the bristlecones are in or out, the reconstruction is the same – he’s really over-reaching. This is simply not true. All he needs to do to see otherwise is to examine Mann’s own CENSORED file, where, without the bristlecones, there is no hockeystick.

Mike, your reputation precedes you, but I’ll give you a shot for a while, but the leash will be short. This is not sci.environment. You’ll have to stay strictly within the 4 corners of each topic – no excursions into other topics e.g. no hurricanes unless the topic is hurricanes, however meritorious your theories may be.

[Response: Absent a public apology regarding your remarks about my ethics, I will not be drawn into a personal discussion with you. Discussion regarding upcoming papers is best left to after they have appeared. -gavin]

It didn’t take realclimate long to revert back to form.

It’s pretty funny that he is prepared to introduce Wahl and Ammann for the purposes of argument, but doesn’t want to discuss it when confronted.

Remember David Appell’s motto: you can never ask too many questions. I don’t recall making any assertions about Gavin’s ethics. I merely asked some questions. They were pointed questions, but still questions nonetheless. Let’s go back to the questions originally posed, which Gavin finds so offensive?

So I ask the question again: is Gavin Schmidt honest about welcoming "serious discussions and rebuttals" at realclimate? About being in favor of openness in climate science? Or even about my being allowed to post at realclimate?

Where do we stand with this right now and I’ll go with the consensus here. Let’s try them in order:

1) do we think that Gavin is honest about welcoming "serious discussions and rebuttals" at realclimate?

2) about being in favor of openness in climate science?

3) about my being allowed to post?

Just asking. Or were they looking for excuses?
Maybe what Gavin’s looking for is something like this:

O great and wonderful Gav, you are the one who welcomes serious discussion and rebuttal. You are the one who favors openness in climate science science. Since the beginning of time, you, in your infinite mercy, have been the one who allows us to post. We abase ourselves in the dust and grovel as miserable worms in your august presence.

Do you think that would be humble enough? Or would a little more self-abasement be required?

The removal of the Gaspe series, or indeed of all the Bristlecone pine trees as well, has a minimal effect ( ~0.05 deg C) on the reconstruction as long as you include consistent numbers of PCs as described in the Dummies Guide. This is most clearly seen in the upcoming W&A paper in Climatic Change where they specifically go into these details (sorry I can’t post the figure).”

Gavin,
Steve’s remarks were in the form of a question, not a statement. The question was based on a perceived difference between the implementation of RC’s postings policy and the stated RC posting policy.

You stated a reason for this perceived discrepancy which certainly makes sense. The filters catch certain posts and they must be reviewed. This takes time and causes posting delays. Based on the appearance of a number of posts on this thread, it appears that this delay has a finite duration. This certainly lends credence to your explanation.

“Sometime after this posting, realclimate posted a comment accusing McKitrick and I of being “politically motivated”.”

Well, yeah! You do take funds from fossil fuel companies for your skeptic “research” in order to distract, obfuscate, and confuse voters into thinking climate change is not happening or that it isn’t the fault of us humans.

You also are frequently contacted by conservative politicians and pundits to give a “Fraser Institute” type speech which rejects the idea of environmental protection. The Fraser Institute is highly political. No association with them cannot be political.

You stated a reason for this perceived discrepancy which certainly makes sense. The filters catch certain posts and they must be reviewed. This takes time and causes posting delays.

I don’t see the reason as making sense in the slightest. What’s to review?

Is the post on topic? Yes.

Is the post scientific? Yes.

Is the post unobjectionable as to tone? Yes, no flames, no personal attacks, no problems.

Post it. Next post, please.

Total time … 3 minutes? 5 minutes? OK, look, I don’t mind if they have Steve’s name ring a big red bell above their workstations when his posts arrive, but after 5 minutes to read the post, what is left but to post it?

… or, of course, not post it … as has happened to too many scientific, on topic, flame- and innuendo-free posts from too many people reading this list to pretend that the RC policies are being followed. For all the rest of us, our posts just “disappear” like the unfortunate Argentinian protesters a few decades ago … gone without a trace.

If Steve were sneaky, he’d have kept quiet for two weeks and then had a perfect case. Perhaps to avoid that (and because he’s not sneaky) and because his blood was boiling he made a big noise after a few days, and …

… whoa, guess what, his post didn’t disappear, like many our posts have, without a trace.

Was this, including the title of this thread, the best way to bring out the issues of the RC hypocrisy?

Danged if I know, but if it were me, and someone posted here “Is Willis honest about wanting scientific discussion on his website?”, I’d be all over both sites proving yes, in fact I am honest, and here’s chapter and verse to prove it, you want scientific discussion, comin’ at’cha … I’d be inviting people to post to show that there were no limits to scientific discussion, and entering into the discussion with them.

It is the lack of this type of behaviour, the behaviour we expect of honest people whose honesty has been questioned, that is so disquieting in this whole climate tragedy. If Mann believed in his work, he’d be out defending it. Instead, he has poor dupes do his dirty work for him, slandering his opponents in his name. But Mann has not come out to discuss bristlecones, or R2, or why he hid the information for so long … are those the acts of an honest man?

Now Gavin has taken his toys and gone home, and says Steve can’t play unless he says he’s sorry … so since we have an interlude becacuse Gavin’s actions conveniently (but only coincidentally, I’m sure) further postpones scientific discussion, let me ask a simple question:

Is that the act of an honest man whose honesty has been questioned? To go off and refuse to either defend, discuss, or demonstrate his honesty until the man who asked the question apologizes for questioning his honesty? Is that the act of an honest man?

Well, yeah! You do take funds from fossil fuel companies for your skeptic “research” in order to distract, obfuscate, and confuse voters into thinking climate change is not happening or that it isn’t the fault of us humans.

Steve has stated that he has not taken any funds from any body to conduct his research. It is entirely self-funded.

If you can show evidence that Steve has taken funds from “fossil fuel companies”, then please present it here. And by evidence, I don’t mean “associated with” or “has been in the same city as” or “filled up his car with gasoline”. I mean invoices, expense claims and/or accounts.

Steve has not “proven” or attempted to prove that climate change does not exist. What he has done is shown that one of the key studies used to support “human-induced” climate change is scientifically and statistically flawed. Again, if you can show that Steve’s work is scientifically invalid, then present it here.

I find it extraordinary that people should behave in this way and still call themselves scientists. I want to see evidence, not fallacious appeals to authority or motivation or popularity or anecdotes.

John A – yes and what makes me extremely cynical is the almost impossibility of getting hold of the raw temperature data – before it is converted to temperature anomalies. Warwick Hughes still cannot get hold of Jone’s data, for example. And scouring the internet, even the Idso’s site, only yields temperature anomalies. I still reckon it analagous to a Climatic Bre-Ex.

This reluctance of releasing the raw data strongly suggests that if other physical scientists get an opportunity to study the data, maybe the earth is not warming up at all. Let the data show the facts, not its statistical manipulation.

Until the raw data are released for public scrutiny, the GW claims have to be considered as specious.

Well, yeah! You do take funds from fossil fuel companies for your skeptic “research” in order to distract, obfuscate, and confuse voters into thinking climate change is not happening or that it isn’t the fault of us humans.

I have said on a number of occasions that I am not funded by fossil fuel companies or anyone else to do this work. There is a substantial opportunity cost for me in doing this as I am not doing any mining deals due to the time involvement of this work and do not develop any business income as a result. I dislike these accusations of financial self-interest, as I am not deriving any income from this, while, on the other hand, public funds are being spent to oppose my views.

I have never said that climate change is not happening. My view would be the diametric opposite: it is always happening. I believe that allocating the proportion that is due to humans is a very important issue. The only specific policies that I have advocated are (1) that scientists be required to archive their data and methods; (2) that proxies used in multiproxy studies be brought up to date to permit validation against the warm 1990s; (3) that disclosure and due diligence practices in climate science be improved. I don’t see why these policies should engender so much animosity and I don’t think that there is much wisdom in the Hockey Team trying to taking a stand on data and method confidentiality.

You also said:

You also are frequently contacted by conservative politicians and pundits to give a “Fraser Institute” type speech which rejects the idea of environmental protection. The Fraser Institute is highly political. No association with them cannot be political.

I have no association with the Fraser Institute. My personal politics are not, in American terms, conservative. I am a great admirer of Bill Clinton and would have voted for him without reservation if I were an American. You have no reason to categorize my views. I am not “frequently contacted by conservative politicians and pundits” to give speeches. Indeed, I’m not frequently contacted by anyone to give speeches. I have given 2 presentations in Washington sponsored by the George Marshall Institute/CEI for which I received no honorarium. I would have been delighted to acept an invitation to speak at other audiences, but, to date, have received 0 invitations from universities or government agencies.

On Friday, Oct. 28 at 9.18 a.m., I made an on-topic post (now #44) in reply to claims made here about our work. Later that day, other posts were accepted, including one that accused us of being “politically motivated”.

I waited a full business day to see what transpired and, on Saturday morning, I re-visited realclimate and my post had still had not been accepted. On a previous occasion, a post to realclimate, which I believed to have been on-topic and free of any ad hominem or other disqualifying attributes, had been rejected and I came to the conclusion that the same thing had happened once again.

As a result, on Saturday morning, I posted a comment at my own blog, http://www.climateaudit.org, in which I outlined the chronology and asked questions about the authenticity of Gavin’s commitment to “welcoming serious discussion and rebuttal”, to openness in climate science and to a prior statement that I would be allowed to post at realclimate. While the questions were pointed, I carefully did not make any allegations, as I realize that there is always a possibility of an innocent explanation even in puzzling circumstances.

On Sunday, Oct 30 at 5:28 p.m., in comment # 51, in response to a question as to why my comment (now #44) had been disallowed, Gavin said that all comments are filtered, that “most pass through immediately, some are caught for later assessment” and that “approval depends on people seeing the comments and deciding to let them through, commenting on them or disallowing them for various reasons (as stated in the comment policy). Sometimes this takes time if people are busy or a response is deemed neccesary, thus comments sometimes appear ‘out of order’, particularly at weekends or when we are busy. This is unfortunate but can’t be helped.”
Later that day, Gavin accepted the comment (now posted up as #44 and bearing the date-time stamp of Oct. 28 9:18 a.m.)

I am pleased to learn that the posting delays for my post were simply due to it being the weekend and not due to any intent on Gavin’s part to suppress “serious discussion or rebuttals”. However, I am sure that Gavin will understand why I asked these questions based on the information available to me. Now that Gavin has answered these questions, I apologize for any embarrassment caused to Gavin by my raising these questions and look forward to participating in a “serious discussion” of the topics raised in this post.

As I mentioned in the redacted post:

Gavin, your statement: “throw it out completely, it still makes no difference” is not correct. The following longer version of his statement that you made recently is also not correct:
“The removal of the Gaspe series, or indeed of all the Bristlecone pine trees as well, has a minimal effect ( ~0.05 deg C) on the reconstruction as long as you include consistent numbers of PCs as described in the Dummies Guide. This is most clearly seen in the upcoming W&A paper in Climatic Change where they specifically go into these details (sorry I can’t post the figure).” http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=172#comment-3626
If you remove the bristlecones and Gaspe, you don’t get a hockeystick – as we’ve said for sometime. If you let the bristlecones in through the back door e.g. by using more PCs in the North American network under a centered calculation; or by abandoning any attempt at regional balance e.g. by making 20% of all proxies in the world bristlecone series, you can get a hockeystick shape. We go through all this in our E&E article.
What is very clear is that MBH98 is not robust to the presence/absence of all dendroclimatic indicators, as was claimed (since it is not robust to the presence/absence of bristlecones).

“I have never said that climate change is not happening. My view would be the diametric opposite: it is always happening. I believe that allocating the proportion that is due to humans is a very important issue.”

This is another way of stating that “chaos was, chaos is, we have no impact on what’s happening next, burn fossil fuels”. Hence whether or not you get your mining contracts, you will be cast as a shill.

As you may know I think that climate is a dampened oscillater, not a chaotic one. The gaia view. It’s not chaos was, chaos is . . . , but rather modulation was, modulation is sustain a living earth. From that perspective, the Little Ice Age, ENSO, PDO, NAO . . . all are not threatening to the science describing the forcing. Even science describing cosmic ray flux input or solar input is not threatening, and certainly not whether there is a hockey stick or a soup bowl.

So, to me, Mr. MacIntyre, it comes down to this question for you–why did Wilma, the lowest BP storm in the Atlantic basin ever recorded, occur when the sun was really really quiet?

“I have never said that climate change is not happening. My view would be the diametric opposite: it is always happening. I believe that allocating the proportion that is due to humans is a very important issue.”

This is another way of stating that “chaos was, chaos is, we have no impact on what’s happening next, burn fossil fuels”.

No it isn’t. He is saying “we do not know what impact humanity is having on climate”. That is completely different from your formulation that “we know humanity is having no impact on climate”.

I apologise, Steve, for saying you are a part of the Fraser Institute. You are not a part of that group. You are, however, affiliated with the Marshall Institute, as found on http://www.exxonsecrets.org/.

Your colleague, Ross McKitrick, however, is a fellow of the Fraser Institute and also associated with the Marshall Institute. Both groups has received funding from ExxonMobil, so even indirectly, you have received some “influence” or funding from the fossil fuel industry. You may not have been paid directly by these industries, but it is foolish to say that you have never been supported in some way by these companies.

the idea that the climate is a “dampened harmonic oscillator” (not oscillater!)🙂 may be a cute idea but it can be easily ruled out. There are hundreds of various periodic as well as aperiodic processes that affect the climate. The Milankovitch cycles – the influence of astronomical cycles on the climate – give periodic dependences with periods up to 100,000 years.

There is an even larger number of less predictable effects. The climate may be “oscillating around something”, but the identity of the “something” is definitely changing with time as well. More importantly, the oscillations certainly don’t decrease with time universally. They are as big (or bigger) than thousands of years ago. And there are many microprocesses in the climate that are known to be unstable – i.e. they exponentially grow with time instead of decreasing for a limited amount of time, before a stronger effect regulates them.

Concerning your Wilma questions: tropical cyclones do not form when “the Sun is loud” as you apparently think. They typically form in the late summer when the ocean water is warm enough, assuming that extra factors such as pre-existing disturbance is present.

Your naive opinions could suggest that “Methane Mike” may be “Mike Mann”.

the heroes of the radical environmentalist movement like you should love everyone who is supported by ExxonMobil. The reason, as William Connolley has pointed out, is that ExxonMobil pays big money to the green “thinkers” who “fight against the climate change”. Look at the page!

You know, the world is pretty complicated, and those who divide the world to those associated with the evil capitalist institutions and nice socialist institutions may sometimes have a hard job when the institutions switch from one side to the other. Too bad that the world is not as simple as your thinking could swallow, right?

Many have talked about the sun spot cycle as inactive during the cold part of the bowl or hockey stick–whatever you want to call it. If a hurricane like Wilma comes when the sun is NOT active, that would seem to be interesting. Of course, I indeed would point out to static field stabilities in the absence of the solar winds.

Mike, the sun is far from quiet in the last decades, even if we now are at a sunspot minimum. In fact the sun is more active than it was in the past 8,000 years, see Usoskin and Solanki. Solar activity now is higher than in the warm 1930-1940 period.
Secondly, the Atlantic Ocean storms are high in number and strength (because of regional circumstances), but the overall trend in other ocean basins is down, such that the global number is not higher in recent years. See Wikipedia for the long term trend in number of storms:
“While the number of storms in the Atlantic has increased since 1995, there seems to be no signs of a global trend; the global number of tropical cyclones remains about 90 ± 10.”
Last but not least, ocean temperatures/heat content need far longer than land to get a new equilibrium when there is more insolation…

Gavin, this is weak, really weak. It doesn’t matter if Steve owes you an apology or not (I don’t think so, btw). That kerfuffle took place off of your BBS. His comment to your site is following the rules for posting.

Bottom line, you’re not following your posting policy. On this and on many other occasions.

Your colleague, Ross McKitrick, however, is a fellow of the Fraser Institute and also associated with the Marshall Institute. Both groups has received funding from ExxonMobil, so even indirectly, you have received some “influence” or funding from the fossil fuel industry. You may not have been paid directly by these industries, but it is foolish to say that you have never been supported in some way by these companies.

How exactly is this “influence” transferred? Is it like a contagious disease propagated by touch? Breathing the same air? Touching a towel that was previously touched by someone related to someone who heard a speech organized by an Institute which had received a small amount of money from an oil company?

How far does this pernicious virus go? Can you catch it from reading a weblog? Receiving an e-mail? Filling up at a gas station?

Ross McKitrick is, as you say, a fellow of the Fraser Institute. He is an unpaid fellow of that Institute.

I’m always amazed at the small amounts of money that can turn a mild-mannered economics professor into a slavering instrument of capitalistic imperialism. You’d think with the billions of dollars raked in by the environmentalist groups, they’d be able to buy a skeptic or two back to the True Belief About Global Warming. It wouldn’t take much – a few thousand dollars apparently – what it costs to run the Rainbow Warrior for a couple of days.

Just imagine the coverage: it would be like a KGB spymaster defecting to the West.

Ditto, JohnA, tho your expression is more cutting than mine. It’s elementary that the warming industry has the money, power, & influences, and loads of it. The “big-oil” remarks must be misnamed reflections of their own influences.

I haven’t posted at RC or here in awhile, due to time requirements with other subjects.

RC permitted roughly 95% of my posts to appear, even though I was posting regularly here and was not repeating the RC mantra. FWIW, I could find no reason why my 5% or so censored posts would have violated their policies.

I can’t figure them out. They let the following post of mine through, but not the one in #105. Maybe it’s because this one didn’t contradict Gavin. Who knows?

Re #59: Lynn, I have not expressed any views about whether or not we have broken through a “noise barrier”. In the papers in controversy, I argued that no conclusions can be drawn as to 20th century uniqueness based on MBH98 for a variety of reasons, including their flawed PC method, the interaction between their PC method and flawed proxies (bristlecones) and the failure of the reconstruction to pass statistical cross-validation tests. I am dubious about other multiproxy papers as well, but have not published on them to date.

James Lane: It’s interesting that both sides are now saying that the stats/methods debate is unimportant. I don’t care. Let’s disaggregate issues. Nothing stoppoing us from discussing them seperately. And the methods, math thing interests me–I’ve pushed Steve and Ross before to characterize how much the methods contribute to the result and how much the (possibly flawed) proxies. But at this point, regardless, I want to know why anyone would use acentric PCA (haven’t heard one defense of it yet…other than it doesn’t matter…but noone says why you WOULD do it).

“All, WRT the issue being boring, I think not. I think we are engaging on exactly what the topic of this post is about, what the published Huybers and VZ comments (AND MM REPLIES) are about. That should be very interesting. Just like digging into what a different form of Muffin Tin Orbital does in Density Functional Modeling should be interesting if you are doing band structure work. This is what science is about. Let’s dig into things. Wilson and Feynman would be proud.

Eli, I agree that it would be interesting to know the efficacy of this (apparently) “paleocommunity-accepted” method is. How it works for different types of datasets, how it might not work, etc. That’s why I asked my question earlier: what prompted the use of the technique of off-centered PCA. I would love to know more about this, but have not heard any references by folks using it to anything other than Preisendorfer (who does not advocate off-center PCA). Are there some methods papers on this method? Also, it seems odd that you tout Huybers for starting to look at the issue and that you say even more experiments on the method would be useful (and Steve’s work also falls into this realm of testing the method), while saying that we should look into why the method was adopted. (Because it would appear that you are saying that more foundational testing of the method is needed despite it being used.)

I’m all ears for the foundational methods paper that the field (or Mann) are basing their use of the method on, though. That would really be interesting. NOT BORING!

P.s. Here’s an interesting question for you, why WOULD one do the off-centric PCA? We always here that it makes no difference, rather than that there is a good reason for using it. If this is commmon practice, why? Surely there must be some posited advantage to use a more elaborate and non-standard method. I’m not asking for validation of the method in this case, just a couple words on “why, in the first place”? Also, is it really common paleo-practice? Is it common practice in other fields? What other studies use it or don’t use it? Is it used in econometrics? I mean the PDEs used for physics are used in econ also. A Bessel function is a Bessel function. If there is some characteristic of the data sets that makes one stat technique preferable (like autocorrelation or variability or whatever) we should be able to label it with a descriptor, preferabbly mathematical.”

Humm, while ClimateAudit has never refused to post my messages, it does like to direct hostility at posters who disagree with the moderators. I am referring to my experience where Steve posted my real name after I had attempted to have John A clarify some of his remarks about thermodynamics (I had posted under a Pseudonym).

TCO, I’m not suggesting that the statistical issues are unimportant. They’re important because they get the bristlecones into the reconstruction.

I also find the statistical issues fascinating – in fact, I became interested in Steve’s work (long before climateaudit) largely because for many years PCA was my bread and butter – i.e. I know something about it.

But the reality is that most observers don’t understand the fine-grain statistical argument. That’s why Mann et al prefer to focus on the statistical argument (“it doesn’t matter”) and ignore the bristlecones (the “elephant under the bed”.)

I find it absolutely amazing that the published paleoclimatic history of the Earth is based on a handful of high altitude North American tree-ring sites. And nobody wants to talk about it.

Oh…and I’m still not sure that you get my point that we should disaggregate issues and that we should track things down to an end wherever possible. In other words, when either side tries to shift out of traking the rabbit to the bottom of it’s hole with an “it’s not important”, I see that as tendentious. As conflating issues. One thing is the rectitude of the method (error or no). The next (if we posit yest t

is the magnitude of such error. But if someone will not admit a small error and insists on shifting the conversation away from directly adessing it by comments on the magnitude, then I see that as slimy bill Clinton equivocation. The kind of stuff that comes from never having had to ruff it in the military. With someone testing your moral courage. With an ugly mug in your mug.

Re #133: James, as usual, I agree on the bristlecones. This creates an important knock-on effect with respect to the “independent studies”. Mann’s PC series are also used in Mann and Jones [2003], Jones and Mann [2004] and 2 bristlecone series are used directly in Crowley and Lowery [2000]. If (1) you have a few hockey stick shaped series in a smallish data set which otherwise is cancelling noise, and (2) then re-scale your average to a temperature scale in the calibration period, you can get hockey stick shaped “reconstructions”. It’s the active ingredient that you have watch. There are a few other series that are stereotype active ingredients: the Mongolia tree rings are a new one (they are curiously like the bristlecones in an arid cool lowish latitude 42N vs 37N for the bristlecones); Dunde ice core, also at 37N; with the Polar Urals having an important role due to its weirdly cold 11th century, making it a favorite of multiproxy compilers.

The weird PC method is a rather exotic flaw. However, recall Bradley’s remarks to the UMass magazine that Mann’s breakthorugh was the development of new mathematical techniques which enabled the identification of trends. Surely his PC method must be one of the things that Bradley had in mind, assuming that Bradley knew enough about the methods to be able to talk about them – which is not certain.

The silence on the bristlecones is deafening. Both VZ and Huybers studiously avoided them. We haven’t heard a peep from Hughes. New samples were taken from Sheep Mountain in 2002, but we haven’t heard a peep from Hughes about them. If they were off the charts, what would you bet that we’d have heard about them almost instantly.

I know exactly what it’s like when you’ve got bad results from a drilling program. You don’t want to release them or you want to delay the results hoping that some new results will put the program onside. But you are legally obliged to release your results in a timely fashion and you don’t have a whole lot of flexibility. You wouldn’t be allowed to wait 3 years like Hughes has done.

Same thing with Thompson’s Puruogangri drilling in 2000. If these results were off the charts we’d have heard about them. This is 5 years now and nothing reported.

I’ve used up my quota of adjectives for the week, so I can’t say out loud what you’d say if you applied the minimum standards for mining promotions to these programs.

TCO, you ask “why would one do off-centric PCA?”. The RC “dummies” guide says they did it in order to “…emphasize records that have the biggest differences from…” the 20th century. Seems to me like looking only for what you want to find…
See Part II (3) at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=121

There are actual two significant PCs found using this convention, and both were incorporated into the full reconstruction.

The “Dummies” guide does say this too. I did not see anything on weighting different PCs in the guide.

They do say that MBH used their interesting centering technique to accentuate the data sets with the greatest difference from the 20th century. Then the separated the data sets into PCs. Then they heavily weighted the two PCs which they picked out with their centering technique.

TCO, I think we’re on the same wavelength. Indeed, my earlier post was an attempt to disaggregate the issues with MBH (although I left one out). As simply as I can:

1. The use of unconventional statistical procedures to exaggerate the contribution of the bristlecones in the reconstruction.

2. The suitability of the bristlecones as temperature proxies for the Northern Hemisphere.

3. The spurious RE statistic and the complete failure of the R2 statistic.

Good luck on getting the Hockey Team to debate (2) or (3), except for them to say that (2) involves “throwing out data” and (3) that R2 is “not sufficient”, when the actual argument is that R2 is necessary (the pea and thimble trick – see Mann’s response to Barton).

What’s really sad is that they appear not to be able to replicate the actual M&M arguments. I wonder if any of them understand active listening? If Gavin or Tim or even Peter would attempt to actually put the M&M arguments into their own words and keep modifying it until Steve would say, “Yes, you’ve captured the essence of what we’re talking about”, it might move the discussion forward. It’d be hard to deny the existance of a point if you’d made it in your own words. If, in the process of producing a ‘product’ that Steve would accept, the hockey teamers start complaining, “you can’t believe that!”, that in itself would be progress.

As it is, the team just zeros in on particular pieces of the argument that they can then take out of context and misrepresent to journalists, etc. Very sad!

It’s defenitely not the type of curiousity that I’m used to in scientists. Would think that they would want to move to precision of understanding (at least precision of the areas of agreement/disagreement). Is Mann the mathematical heavy lifter in the group? I wonder if the others are a little out of their depth (I know that I am).

Those are the tactics of the M&M crowd. They’re the ones complaining because they cannot get much of their work published in peer-reviewed journals (a sign their work is fatally flawed).

“As it is, the team just zeros in on particular pieces of the argument that they can then take out of context and misrepresent to journalists, etc. Very sad!”

Now who has the most access to journalists? Skeptics are given far more access proportionally than those who are on the “hockey team.” If the world were fair, skeptics would be given one minute of airtime for every 200 minutes of “hockey team” airtime.

MBH98 calibrates its proxies by linear regression against the temperature principal component series in the 1902-1980 calibration period. (or rather by a process that yields exactly the same answer as linear regression.) Here is how this trivial operation is described in MBH98 (this is shortened a little by leaving out some matrices):

These Neofs eigenvectors were trained against the Nproxy indicators, by finding the least-squares optimal combination of the Neofs PCs represented by each individual proxy indicator during the N= 79 year training interval from 1902 to 1980 (the training interval is terminated at 1980 because many of the proxy series terminate at or shortly after 1980). The proxy series and PCs were formed into anomalies relative to the same 1902–80 reference period mean, and the proxy series were also normalized by their standard deviations during that period. This proxy-by-proxy calibration is well posed (that is, a unique optimal solution exists) as long as N> Neofs (a limit never approached in this study and can be expressed as the least-squares solution to the overdetermined matrix equation,… The Neofs-length solution vector x is obtained by solving the above overdetermined optimization problem by singular value decomposition for each proxy record … This yields a matrix of coefficients relating the different proxies to their closest linear combination of the Neofs PCs;… This set of coefficients will not provide a single consistent solution, but rather represents an overdetermined relationship between the optimal weights on each on the Neofs PCs and the multiproxy network.

Talk about inflated language to describe a trivial procedure. All of this stuff can be done in one line of code (I kniow, I’ve done it). Not only is inflated, but it’s hard to understand. I’ve taked to some people who gave up trying to understand what they did. I had to experiment a little to be sure that the optimization was identical to linear regression, but it is. Then once you know it’s regression, there is well-known linear algebra for the results and you can do all this in one line.

Even better, once you do it in linear algebra, you can see the exact contribution of each proxy to the final results. I’ve got some really good notes on this that I should publish.

Re #145: Stephen, I am quite scrupulous about quoting anyone I’ve criticized in their own words. You will have a very difficult time citing an actual example where I’ve mischaracterized someone else. (Not to say that it won’t happen, but I can’t recall anyone recently bringing an example to my attention.) On the other hand, we have explicitly stated over and over that we have not proposed a “MM05” or “MM03” reconstruction. We have shown the effect on MBH98-type calculations of slight variations. Yet how many times have you seen people criticize the MM recosntruction? We say that people should look at the R2 statistic; this is altered into us supposedly saying that people should only look at the R2 statistic, on and on.

We’ve had 4 articles published so far this year in peer-reviewed journals. I’m not complaining. I’ve had invitations from other journals and, if I’d finished more articles, would have published more. Running this blog interferes with finishing articles in one way, but if I didn’t blow back against the disinformation, I’d have been mau-mau’ed to death long ago.

Just what dream world (I suppose you’d say nightmare world) do you live in where climate skeptics get more attention in the media than warmers do? Or is your ‘proportionally’ supposed to make everything ok? (BTW, the ‘team’ consists of a dozen or two connected researchers, M&M consists of two men. The ratio should therefore be about 10%, not .5%)

In any case, I didn’t say anything about how much time proportionally or directly either the Hockey team or skeptics spent with journalists. I think your guilty conscience made you think I must be talking about media bias rather than about the Hockey Team lying to reporters (whether biased ones or not).

Re: #149, “(BTW, the “team’ consists of a dozen or two connected researchers, M&M consists of two men. The ratio should therefore be about 10%, not .5%)”

You’re leaving out the IPCC, which, on the whole, is in agreement with the MBH studies and disagrees with the M&M studies. 2500 researchers generally on the “hockey team” to how many on the M&M team?

“In any case, I didn’t say anything about how much time proportionally or directly either the Hockey team or skeptics spent with journalists. I think your guilty conscience made you think I must be talking about media bias rather than about the Hockey Team lying to reporters (whether biased ones or not).”

As the general media bias goes, it is heavily pro-skeptic, where they feel the need to “balance one view with another” by putting a skeptic and a “hockey teamer” on the same show.

As “about the Hockey Team lying to reporters,” that is utter slander. How can you call them liars when people like Steven Milloy and Pat Michaels spew their version of junk science on the public?

I don’t know about Michaels, I rarely run across anything by him. Milloy I find generally right on. He makes mistakes, of course, as does everyone. But ‘spewing’ pretty well gives away your POV, if it wasn’t otherwise obvious.

Come on, get your wonderful Hockey Team members to actually engage in a debate on the issues instead of lying to the press about what Steve has said. And that goes double for you, Tim. Come over here and defend Bristlecones or any tree rings, for that matter, as temperature proxies.

Actually this thread has stopped being about Gavin and RC a while back. I don’t think he’s been totally exonorated, but at least some skeptical messages are getting through on RC. So he’s on probation. I may try them again today or tomorrow and see if the Bristlecone filter is still in place. Not that it matters. People who think Bristlecones are good temperature proxys are welcome to come here and debate the issue.

Re #131: John (Cross), I looked at the post in question. I wasn’t trying to out you or “intimidate” you. There was no reason to. Your email address on the post was john.cross at…The discussion referred to Johm A. I was just trying to keep the John’s straight in my reply – nothing else. Sorry if I breached a protocol; if I did, it wasn’t intentional.

I don’t know what your comment regarding John A’s business was about. I believe Lambert outed McIntyre when Steve was posting under another name to defend his own work. You are welcome to review what I said and see if it is similar in your opinion: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=264

Re: # 159: Steve, thanks for the reply. However I question the reason given. You claim that you posted my full name to avoid confusion with other Johns. However your reply was not in another post but appended to my initial post so I don’t think there would have been much confusion. Also, I am not sure about the relevance of my e-mail address since I thought that e-mails associated with posters “will not be published”.

However I am prepared to accept that it was not an intentional breach of protocol if you can show me other examples of where you post the full name of people who use an alias.

“However I am prepared to accept that it was not an intentional breach of protocol if you can show me other examples of where you post the full name of people who use an alias.”

John – that’s a doozy of a condition you have there. Steve apologises for unintentionally revealing your name and you agree to accept that it was unintentional if Steve can point to places where he intentionally posts people’s full name. Want to check your logic? If it was unintentional and not what was intended then surely the absence of other examples would be better proof. After all, if he did it all the time, that would seem to be intentional.

#167 – “Why is being “skeptical” ideal? Inquisitive is fine. However, if one is exposed to correct science (as is the case with MBH), one is persuaded that this is right.”

First, one needs to be exposed to the science. This was not the case with MBH98. MBH98 claimed to use a “standard” PC method. It was not. MBH hid source code for years. That’s not “exposure”.

Next, was MBH98 “correct” science? I think that a non-standard PC method used without justification could be considered incorrect science. I think that using tree-rings as a proxy for temperature could be considered incorrect science. I think that failing to report unfavorable R2 statistics could be considered incorrect science.

Maybe you are loading the word skeptical with portents of being a climate skeptic. What I mean is the guys in class who really thought through things were the ones who didn’t push the I believe button and instead checked the teacher’s algebra. Same thing with people who watch colloquioum speakers. or same thing with being a decent engineering officer of the watch. A couple skeptical questions can do a lot of good when looking at something…

Boy, Stephen Berg (pardon the formality, but I’m in the same bind Steve McIntyre was with Mr. Anonymous above,

What you apparently don’t know about the history of the great hockeystick debate would fill volumes. Do you realize how much effort Steve I had to go to just to get enough of the data to mostly replicate MBH98? There’s no way a peer reviewer would have had the data needed to find the statistical (and data) flaws he did. Mann still hasn’t released all of his code (as Tim Lambert admitted in comment # 152 above where he blames Steve for claiming that Tim had claimed that all the code had been released.)

Where is this Weart’s History to be found? I suspect it’s propaganda, but I’ll read it if you like and tell you what I think of it.

My 130 post is still not up on RC. They seem to be restricting the conversation again. It’s ok, though. That’s how they cut debate off when it “bores them”. You would think they would allow the post and not respond if they are bored (still allowing others to decide for themselves…horrors!)

#166 “If it is “fatally flawed,” how did it get published in a peer-reviewed journal? That would be impossible.” Um, to those of us who have spent our careers as professional scientists this is a hysterically funny statement. People have gotten tenure at places like the Harvard Medical School based on completely fraudulent experiments that were only discovered later. Cancer research is full of examples. Remember “cold fusion” that was going to produce cheap energy from heavy water by nuclear fusion with just two simple electrodes and some electricity? I know of someone who got tenure at MIT for explaining how it worked. What an embarrassment that was (the physics department had the good sense to pan the idiot and his stupid theory). I could go on, but you get the idea.

AGW is completely unproven. Actually it’s nonsense based on bad science and loud noises. After studying Weart, you should take a look at Hoyt’s scorecard of AGW predictions versus the reality. It ain’t pretty. http://www.warwickhughes.com/hoyt/scorecard.htm

Weart’s “the Discovery of Global Warming” http://www.aip.org/history/climate/. AIP = American Institue of Physics. It’s not bad and certainly has lots of interesting history and information. You don’t have to think the claim is correct to find the site useful.

#179 Paul has taken the words out of my mouth. Weart’s site provides a good history of the “global warming” story and highlights the contribution of Mann et al , with the hockeystick graph faithfully reproduced.

Of course it says nothing about “the MBH version of the science being correct”.

Re #165: John C., your post was addressed to John A. I was merely showing that I was reply to you, rather than communicating to John A. When I logon, I’m in administrator mode and there’s no message about email confidentiality in administrator mode. I logged out and re-entered in a public mode and I see your point about the email address confidentiality. I hadn’t noticed this before as it doesn;t show in administrator mode. Again, I apologize for any inconvenience; as I said before, I was not trying to make anything of it.

re 179
I verified the claim by Weart that arrhenius reduced his value of 5 degres for CO2 doubling in 1901. Arrhenius did reduce the value for co2 halving, however, he increased the value for co2 tripling.

A point about Huybers’ Comment, to which we had a very precise Reply not discussed in the head post.

In our GRL article, we pointed out that the MBH reconstruction failed important cross-validation tests (such as the R2 test, but not only the R2 test) and that these failures were unreported. There is no benchmark theory for RE significance. We argued that the seemingly high RE statistic in MBH98 was “spurious” – using the term “spurious” in the statistical sense of Granger and Newbold [1974] and Phillips [1986], not in an argumentative sense and showed that the biased PC1s could be used to create “reconstructions” which had high RE and low R2 statistics.

Huybers argued that this model of a spurious RE mechanism did not replicate a re-scaling procedure, now known to be in MBH98 from the source code release. Huybers did some new simulations, purporting to show that the benchmark should be a low one, rather than the high benchmark that we had proposd.

In our Reply, we pointed out that Huybers had not implemented other important aspects of MBH procedure. We re-did our RE simulations, applying information from the source code, and once again obtained a high RE benchmark.

The most important point is the failure of the cross-validation R2 statistic. We have never argued (contrary to some characterizations of our work) that the cross-validation R2 statistic is sufficient for statistical significance; however, we do argue that it is necessary.

Ok, I’ve read all, I think, of the pertinent sections in Weart. There are some things there I want to look into more when I get a chance. In particular some of the discussion of the absorption of CO2 vs H2O, including the fact that at surface pressures H2O bands do indeed blur with CO2 bands needs to be looked at.

Let’s look at a few quotes:

“They had done far more extensive and sophisticated analysis of the weather records, confirmed by “proxy” data such as studies of tree rings and measurements of old temperatures that lingered in deep boreholes.”

But there’s no link to a tree-ring proxy discussion. It’s just assumed they’re ok.

“This consensus was sharply attacked by a few scientists. Some pulled out the old argument that the advance of urbanization was biasing temperature readings. In fact, around 1990 meticulous re-analysis of old records had squeezed out the urban heat-island bias to the satisfaction of all but the most stubborn critics.”

This is a nice job of assuming what you want to prove. Sure there were papers published claiming the data had been adjusted, but the data hasn’t been released to allow anyone to check what had been done. I know Hans here thinks the adjustments are ok, but certainly others don’t. I could be convinced either way, but so far I’m with the skeptics.

” With the urbanization argument discredited, the skeptics turned to measurements by satellites that monitored the Earth.”

Here we see bias creeping into the wording. “Discredited” has a negative connotation. “Settled” would have been a more unbiased term, even if it still would have still have claimed more that was shown.

“The skeptics persisted. But most scientists concluded that while the computer models were surely imperfect, the satellite data analysis was too ambiguous to pose a serious challenge to the global warming consensus. [This hunch was confirmed in 2004 when a new analysis of the data showed that the mid levels had in fact been warming much as predicted.”

This is again a distortion. And it required accepting changes which were basically determined by how well some adjustments agreed with the surface record. The even more recent changes (2005) increased the earlier UAH readings slightly, but it’s still well below what the surface readings would require if we were looking at a primarily Anthropic warming.

Getting finally to the ongoing debate here:

” The dedicated minority who insisted that there was no global warming problem promptly attacked the calculations. For example, in 2003 a few scientists argued that the Medieval Warm Period was in fact as hot as the 20th century.”

This is very misleading. There are people who don’t thing there is global warming and there are M&M (the emphasis on S&B is spurious, IMO, and in any case irrelevant to what’s going on here). They are not the same. Steve has not taken a position on Anthropic Global Warming. He’s found errors in MBH98 (and these same problems appear to apply to the other multi-proxy temperature reconstructions). The effect of the mistakes was to make it appear that the MWP wasn’t as warm relative to current temperatures as it’d previously seemed to be. Correcting MBH98 merely would have returned to the previous understanding. But by this time the hockeystick is too much an icon for warmers to be willing to relinquish it even while they distance themselves from its source.

Actually the most biased thing in the entire site is the footnote 47 in the Modern Temperature Trend section which details some of the MBH98 vs M&M controversy. It gives two sites for further study, RC and Stephen Schneider’s ultra-biased site. No sign of this site or any other skeptic site. Schneider, BTW, as you can tell, I have no respect for. His couple of hit pieces on Bjorn Lomborg were hideous. That he’s supposed to be the go-to guy for evaluating M&M rather disconcerts me.

In summary, and I haven’t by any means read all of this history, it’s a typical story; all the interesting stuff is condensed into a sentence or two and the nitty-gritty discussion, such as happens here, is ignored. Attempts to claim that the particular wording used represents the correct science is a misunderstanding of what science is all about. A modern evaluation of what happened a century or two ago can still be biased, but at least all the major points will have been settled by now. Trying to provide a summary statement for science which is less than a decade old and still very much the subject of discussion is foolishness. A history written a century from now about it will still be recognizable but whether it says, “Eventually all the skeptics were convinced….” or “Eventually it was recognized that the earlier worries were overblown….” remains to be seen.

Dave, essentially everything you wrote (apart from the quotes, that is) are blatant lies. You seem to be back around 1975, rather than in 2005. Have you read Parker’s and Peterson’s studies on the UHI?

Also, you’re throwing around the word “bias” far too often. If Schneider, MBH, et al. were biased, they would never have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

I think you’re missing the point. One of Steve’s main points (which pops up frequently on the many threads on this site) is that the hockey stick team is somewhat incestuous. They cite and refer to each other. Steve has also shown, through his efforts, that peer review doesn’t mean that the published contents are accurate, correct or even right…only that someone else looked at them. Your posts here seem to imply that “peer review” means “thoroughly vetted.” Clearly, it does not.

1) Do you think the bristlecones are good temperature proxies? If so, why?
2) Do you think Mann’s methodology is valid? If so, why?
3) Do think Mann’s hockeystick graph is robust? If so, why?

If you wish to refer to someone else’s response to those questions in order to back up your answer, feel free. Just make sure you clearly indicate who and what you’re citing as source material.

SB, I’m sorry, but I’ve developed such a lack of respect for your intellectual judgment from the way you make off-hand remarks like how people must be right or they wouldn’t be in peer-reviewed journals or that I, for instance must be lying (apparently just because I disagree with you), that I don’t give a fig what you say. Goodbye.

I am also curious about the reason for the Mann method (off-center standardization). While this is not the only fault that Steve M. has argued in the Mann work, it is one of them and is interesting mathematically. VZ makes a passing reference to the technique as a bit strange but not unknown in paleo work. However, I have not seen any reference by Mann to foundational (mathematical) studies that prove the technique efficacious or at least non-artifact-creating. Nor am I aware of anyone else using the technique. The method is also not described or recommended by experts like Preisendorfer or Hotelling.

In science, it is important to fully describe your methods (so that others can evaluate their efficacy, dangers, etc. and so that “even if your method is flawed”, some of the value of the work can be preserved by corrections”.) In MBH98, Mann did not even say that he had done this non-standard technique. Leaving aside, the issue of whether the technique is sound, not describing it is poor publication practice. Like not describing a critical recrystallization step in an organic synthesis. I hope the failure to describe the method was sloppiness rather than deception or haughtiness.

Steve L., on your post, I agree that a better understanding of the exact nature of how much the off-center technique skews results is important. I’ve seen both sides tending to conflate the issues when what we need, is to disaggregate and drill down. That’s how math and science work. However, I still think it is important to address the methodology issue and clarify what thechniques are appropriate. Even if Mann got lucky or his errors canceled out, or whatever, we need to know how to do statistics properly. If the method is in debate, let’s dig into it and figure out what the implications are.

Gavin, please post this. It’s not critical that you and I come to agreement (although I’m interested in a thoughtful response). If you’re “bored” by continued discussion related to the topic and the controversy, that’s fine, no response required. However, no reason to stop other people on the site from considering alternate, opposed viewpoints. (In keeping with the site policy.) Let people read and think.

In MBH98, Mann did not even say that he had done this non-standard technique. Leaving aside, the issue of whether the technique is sound, not describing it is poor publication practice. Like not describing a critical recrystallization step in an organic synthesis. I hope the failure to describe the method was sloppiness rather than deception or haughtiness.

Just noticved that bit.

Is line one agreeed by all parties? Is line two agreeed by all parties? Therefore, does line three follow? And if not (and I think it isn not) isn’t line four just more, sophisticated yes, schoolyard stuff? You’re, at times, far better than that! You expect it to be published?????

1. There’s no debate that Mann did not disclose the detail of the off-center normalization. I mean read the paper–it’s not in the description of research method. I don’t know if Mann (or “the team”) agrees with the characterization of “non-standard”. I’d loooove to hear their rationale for considering it standard if that’s their position…;-)

2. Line 2 is my assertion–I don’t know their views–I’m interested in the response. My assertion is based on having written a lot of papers for publication and from having done a lot of reading on the ethics of proper publication (books, journal policies, institute policies, etc.) My views are particularly well stated by Wilson (the chemist, father of Nobel prize winner) in his seminal book on Science Research Methods.

3. Line 3 is an example from my field of a pernicious and vexing error that is analagous. (Basically you need to disclose enough so that someone can duplicate the work.)

4. If you posit 1-2 (3 is an example), then 4 is the next issue to address. BTW, I’ve made mistakes in publications.

Re # 176 Dave: I prefer to be called Mr. Non-Anonymous these days. However I am surprised that you do not see the difference between using information that is stated to be private and information that is part of a public post. If you wish I am willing to explain it to you in detail.

Steve: I see that I was not clear. Your apology is of course accepted but I am not sure that it was necessary. This is your site, you make the rules and if I don’t like them I can go elsewhere. That being said, I remain a little skeptical about your explanation. You have to admit the odds are pretty fantastic.

There are many posts of mine to which you might have made that post, but I’m darned if I can figure out why you made it to this one.** Do you perhaps also lack a sense of humor and not understand my point?

Let me explain and save either you or JC the necessity of being embarassed by having to ask. John had got in a bit of a huff about being “outed” by Steve. Steve has explained it was an artefact of how he sees messages. John has somewhat ungraciously accepted the apology, but that’s beside the point. Whether John and Steve were lovey-dovey or in open warfare doesn’t matter. The “I was trying to be anonomous” tag is attached to John’s persona here. Therefore it’s something which can be referred to lightly, just as we can joke about TCO’s great number of messages. I don’t know if you follow the news or not, but there was a light-hearted bit of banter by President Bush the other day when he talked about leaking in a press-conference with foreign reporters and explained it was an inside joke. Well, my reference to Mr. Anonomous was an inside joke for those here who had been following the contretemps. That John apparently didn’t understand that there was no judgmentalism in the offhand phrase demanded that I point out that it was meant as a joke. The second sentence was, however, a tit-for-tat return of his condescending assumption I didn’t understand the issues.

**BTW, as a practical matter, I assume your remark was poor attempt on your own part to be funny, so I’ll try to also explain why if falls flat. Had you left off the last phrase it might have worked. I.e. it might have caught me off guard and I’d have responded, “what are you talking about Peter?”, as my first sentence in this post might have fooled you into thinking I was saying. But explaining a prank in the process of making it is a big no-no in humor. It’d be like putting a sign over your Candid Camera location saying “Hidden Camera”. Anyway, once you’d have pulled me in you could then have said, “Dave, it was just a joke, like you ‘Mr. Anonomous’ was a joke. Do you see why John Cross might not have seen it as a joke?” Then you might have proved something.

But in fact, while you might have fooled me you also might not have. While this site has many things going on, one aspect of it which is missing in many sites is that there’s a lot of high-power brains on display. As such, they’re supposed to be able to see beyond the obvious and catch the occasional inside joke or double meaning. Sadly I don’t see much of this. I suspect it’s because there’s such an adversarial relationship between the ‘sides’. I’m sure Tim or Gavin can be the life of the party when they want to be and that Steve isn’t unacquainted with lampshades, so that having such a serious back and forth is a bit wearing and I like to lighten things up when I can.

Re #197: John C, what do you mean the odds are fantastic? Write to WordPress and ask them what someone sees in administrator mode if you don’t believe me. It’s actually a software defect, since the software is saying something to the public that’s not being displayed to the administrator. What are the odds of this – who knows, but it’s the case.

I had a post get through at realclimate, which received a typical ungracious Willliam Connolley response. They seem wildly inconsistent. I just posted the following:

Re #90: William, the lack of independence in authorship in the majority of commonly-referenced multiproxy studies can be seen merely by inspecting the names of the coauthors: Briffa et al [2001] with coauthor Jones is obviously not “independent” in authorship from Jones et al [1998] with coauthor Briffa. Jones and Mann [2004] and Mann and Jones [2004] are not independent of the above two studies or of Mann, Bradley and Hughes [1998, 1999] or Bradley and Jones [1993], which are not independent of Hughes and Diaz [1994] or Bradley, Hughes and Diaz [2003]. Cook and Schweingruber provide common links to other studies. This is all a matter of public record. Beyond the multiproxy coauthorship, the various authors have often coauthored elsewhere. These are not “independent” authors in the way that this term is generally understood by the public.

Briffa himself has noted the overlap of proxies between studies. To pick one example, 13 of 17 proxies used in Jones et al [1998] are used directly in MBH98-99 and a 14th is used in its individual components. The flawed bristlecone/foxtail proxies are used repetitively: MBH98-99; Crowley and Lowery [2000]; Mann and Jones [2003], Jones and Mann [2004]; Esper et al [2002]. There are important defects in Briffa’s Polar Urals reconstruction which affects MWP results in MBH99; Crowley and Lowery [2000]; Jones et al [1998].

I am not putting forward an alternative “reconstruction”, which I am claiming to be the “right” one. I am pointing out the possibility of some systemic problems in the existing repertoire.

I noticed your comment 192 up at RC on my RSS feed, however, when I looked at the RC website it was gone. In case you missed it, the response to your comment was:

[Response: Well its being posted, but pleas won’t make any difference. You seem to overestimate Gavins influence… You also seem to misunderstand this site. If you want a forum for unmoderated discussion of whatever pleases you, you may use sci.environment. Moderation is important. See here – William]

Climate scientists sometimes use highly technical language and jargon that is sometimes difficult for the lay reader to understand, however, if I may, I think I can put his response into laymens terms, as follows:

[Response: Well its being posted, but pleas won’t make any difference. You seem to underestimate Mike’s influence…You also seem to misunderstand this site. If you want a forum for open, frank and on topic technical discussion of climate issues, go somewhere else. Censorship is important (to our cause).- William]

Dave, thanks for the essay on humor. I probably didn’t see the humor since the situations are not at all similar. However, I do take some exception to your comment that I was ungracious in accepting Steve’s apology. I truly did not mean to be and I thought I was being quite civil to claim that he did not in fact owe me an apology.

One good thing that has come of this is that I do acknowledge that you do have a sense of humor. You said “one aspect of it which is missing in many sites is that there’s a lot of high-power brains on display.” – see, now that’s funny!
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(I am joking of course).

Steve, I am happy to accept your comments about what WordPress does and doesn’t do. The odds that I am referring to were the fact that you “outed” me on a thread where you also shut down a technical argument that you did not wish to see take place on your site. You have to admit that since this appears to be the first and only time that you published private information about a poster, it did have tones of intimidation in it — disagree with the moderator and get outed. However if you assert that this was not the case I will let it rest on here.

It’s somewhat ironic, John ~A, that immediately after contending that you had not been ungracious, you immediately post another message showing ungraciousness in the same way. Part of being gracious is dropping a subject once you’ve accepted an apology.

William (will post on RC too). I’m not asking for an unmoderated board. I know that ad hominems and trolling are forbidden. I am asking to be allowed to make points and arguments on the hockeystick issue. That is to be allowed to debate and make converse arguments in keeping with the statements on blog policy (although practice seems to be different than policy).

IMO, the “momentum is not conserved” bit is merely a specious misrepresentation on a few simple analogies that were offered. The direct criticisms perhaps failed, (especially in lieu of the specialist response to JA, in which JA seemed to misrepresent until RPsr posted the full correspondence) From the beginning it seemed to me that Gavin and William were arguing for modelled reality over reality reality. Weird.

Looks like you got a brief explanation on RealClimate as to why 192 got posted up and then taken away:

If your comment was deleted, then you stepped over the invisible line. Have another go, but more carefully… – William

There you go – we have the quite visible posting policy, but there is also a line, which is invisible. That explains a lot. Wouldn’t it be useful if that line was also visible? It would save us all a lot of time, I’m sure.

Clearly all blogs are owned by the bloggers who run them. Many partisan blogs allow only one point of view and this is fine, as long as it is clearly stated, or patentaly obvious to participants. If only one point of view is ever posted, then there is censorship regarless of what the policy might state.

RC claims to be

a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.

This sounds great and is generally believed by many people – including much of the press. However, they remove remarks which might be difficult to answer or point out things that they do not want to deal with. They missrepresent the points of anyone who dissagrees with them but they say it is boring and redact or remove posts which attempt to set the record straight.

It really bothers me that William, Gavin, Mike et al are representing RC as an unbiased resource of climate science informnation, but they operate RC as an advocacy site.

I have no problem with advocacy sites, however I have a serious problem with advocacy blogs which present themselves as ubiased public resources. The quote from RC above provides guidelines, but William has made it clear that RC often goes way beyond these guidelines in determining what is appropriate for their blog.

Gavin, Mike, and William have a perfect right to do this. I would like them to add something like “The contributors will edit or exclude any post which they feel is inappropriate for any reason whatsoever.”

I was just making sure that everyone understood the issue and was clear about it. I believe that this action is somewhat justified (above and beyond a strict desire for accuracy) since Steve now knows about a software defect that he did not before. I am somewhat surprised that you feel that graciousness should take priority over accuracy but I appreciate your point of view.

John C, I can understand your frustration, however, I have a few questions:
I can’t recall the particular thread, but… hadn’t you posted previously on this site with your full name? Also, I do remember reading and commenting on a post you had made to deltoid where you were complaining about being “outed” on this site, but hadn’t that site in question cross-referenced IP addresses and come up with one or more false positives?
(I’m thinking mainly of the per=Brignell debacle) /as well as the Nigel supposed ‘outing’.
I do like being anonymous however, and I think I appreciate your concern.

You are correct, I had used my full name prior to posting under the name of A(nother) John. Perhaps this is justification for the “outing”, but if so that point has not been raised by anyone except yourself. I will note that there was no overlap of content between my posts. You can find my comment (number 12) here. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=264

In regards to the Per incident, I would not say it was a similar case. What Per did was to post rather aggressive comments under a pseudonyme in order to support what he said as Per. For example posting as James Brown he said (in post 22 )

Wu, how did you get it so wrong! How did you make so many mistakes ? I’ll bet you must be feeling a right little peckerhead by now ! So tell me where do you get your science background from ? Are you like an assistant professor epidemiologist, and per is a full professor epidemiologist ?

In this case I feel that Tim was somewhat justified in the outing since the comment makes it appears that there is someone else out there who feels that Per is correct. I also believe that Per posted under a third name (M. Mouse) in defense of his position.

In my case, after Steve posted saying that we should take the discussion elsewhere I did not post about it again.

John C., I don’t understand why you keep making backhanded comments about "justifying your outing". One more time, I was not intentionally trying to "out" you; it was an incidental comment and without any significance to me at the time. I explained what happened. To illustrate further that I had no motive to try and "out" you, simply recall that I’ve put up with John Hunter; Tim Lambert etc., why would I try to "intimidate" you? For all I knew then and know now, John Cross was a pseudonym. As you point out, there are no other incidents of this type. I’ve given you an explanation; I wish that you’d just accept it.

By the way, I do appreciate your taking the entropy discussion elsewhere. It’s a nice contrast to Lambert’s trenchcoat flashing on this topic.

Could we have a new post to beat John up for his blithe statements about thermo? In Rumsfeldian fashion, I know enough to know what I don’t know and have studied thermo at graduate level and all. And I knew right away that John was swinging from the trenches with that comment where he showed lack of realization that entropy does not have units of energy (and spare me that after the fact deal with him assuming it was constant temp–I can tell when someone is sharp on a subject or not, even when I don’t have it gnat’s ass.)

HAs anyone looked at the sidebars at realclimate? There are a couple of interesting ones. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?cat=16 is a list of press clippings: this stuff takes time, who do you suppose does it? Is it one of the profs or someone at Environmental Defense Fund? There’s also a link “For Journalists” which is password protected. What do you suppose is behind the green door?

Re #224 and 227: Once again, there are many topics which I do not feel obliged to host. For example, creationism. I’m also not prepared to host a discussion of thermodynamics for different reasons, whcih have been discussed. Tim Lambert has a thread on this, which is known to any interested parties. Or you can go to sci.environment. It would be nice if Lambert commented on realclimate censorship, the topic of the post, rather than [edited: interjecting irrelevantly] yet again on entropy.

I must confess to a bit of mystification about “outing”, which relates to my lack of understanding about posting under pseudonyms on this site in general. I, me, Willis Eschenbach, stand behind my postings by putting my own name on them, as does Steve. If some of you guys want to hide behind phoney names, it makes me wonder why. Kinda like I wonder why Michael Mann hides his data, I wonder why you hide your names …

TCO, the trouble with Methane Mike, who I admit I inflicted on this forum and RC as an experiment on several levels, is that even when you understand what he means by a statement, it’s still confusing. However I won’t go farther since experimenter interference can affect the results of the experiment.

Willis: There are actually a number of reasons why one might post under a pseudonym. However instead of going into these I might ask for your opinion on why one of the moderators of this site should be anonymous?

In fact, I think that if you split posters on this site into those who support Steve’s point of view and those who challenge it, you would find a larger percentage whom are anonymous in the supporting group.

I will try to say it more simply. I respectfully but strongly disagree with Tim Lambert in particular because he has brought up as a center portion of his ‘skepticism’ the Dane research on cosmic ray flux and neoglacials. It’s based on the fact that when the solar system runs up and down the plane of the Milky Way cosmic ray levels will change–and so does the paleo climate record in response to what is calculated to be that movement up and down in the plane. What I am saying is that cosmic ray flux is particularly significant as an ELECTRICAL phenonmenon, but not real interesting as an energy source. So Mr. Lambert puts in this skeptical view based on this research, BUT fails to ALSO comment whether CO2 has an equally significant ELECTRICAL significance, and, hence, has a dependant relationship with the cosmic ray flux. From my perspective, it’s a HUGE blunder. And instead of fostering skepticism, his central argument is almost as fraudulant as the warmers.

As a sub point to this, not only did Wilma form when the sun was quiet, but also the latest reading on the QBO, which is an ion wind, was at its record negative levels. For those of you who know what Coulumb’s law is–this may strike you as not so hard to understand, but for those who don’t know what a static field is, well, it’s going to be hard to understand, but that QBO was during this past month at a record negative reading, and that, IMHO, is indicative of very specific conditions where capactive couplings could and did occur to impact cloud microphysics properties. Anyway, to go all the way with it, as many of you already know, I am unconcerned with the ‘hockey stick’, but think that we have changed the osscilation to be twice as hard and fast–and what comes up too fast goes down as badly. And the reason why I am posting here is the statistics are not the cause. You write about correlations and forget cause and you can make huge blunders and defeat the very mathematical approach you hope to acheive.

BTW, this is a highly complex discussion. If you don’t understand what I am talking about, perhaps because I understand a concept better than I can communicate it, PLEASE ask a question.

BTW2, I had a wonderful weekend and saw the Nutcracker performed by a touring Russian dance company here in Redding California. It was such an awesome thing that it brought me to what is the true meaning of what it means to walk with Jesus. So, even though I . . . I was very upset with Tim Lambert’s book because of the misleading things in it, at the same time I respect the fact that someone from another land, who speaks a totally different langauge, can learn English and write something that captured the dogma of the warmers and got them essay writing in such anger. But I was not one of them–my beef was over the use of the cosmic ray flux research. There’s a Nirvana song that talks about the man with the gun, but he don’t know what it means . . . that was Mr. Lambert, and he could have used that gun better if it knew what it meant.

I had an equally angry view of the late John Daly. He based his main skeptical ideas on the SOI index–which is ironically causally about CO2 coming out of solution in the Pacific, to one side or the other, and impacting surface conductivities associated with the capacitive couplings I am writing about that change cloud microphysics. So he pointed to something and he didn’t know what it meant (from a causal standpoint). Another man with a gun.

I want to say that with the tropical storm season ending one individual stands out as having the greatest discovery this year on the subject. His name is Jim Hughes. He’s not a PhD or anything–not even sure he went to college. He’s just someone who has spent a huge amount of time looking at some of the new data sources on the sun, and actually looking at weather on earth to see what happens. What he’s observed he’s communicated fairly well and this is what I saw with my own eyes. When the solar winds drop BELOW 500 km/sec–that’s when you will see more cyclonic activity. He also has a number of other regional/seasonal observations spanning years of observations. Which I confirmed with my own eyes. Every single storm this year I saw impacted by this, including the flooding in Bombay. Again, with a lower distorting wind from the sun, static fields are more able to organize and coupled between ionosphere and ocean, and storms self organize from altered cloud microphysics.

I have a gun, just like John Daly, just like Tim Lambert. Only CO2 comes out of solution with surface lows, and impacts conductivities. CO2 has a DEPENDANT relationship with a living, electrical earth.

Steve McIntyre “¢’¬? you have a gun. How will you go down in history? BTW, my last name, Doran, is Irish. It means ‘stranger’ in Galic. You are a very very good mathematician. But you are not on to cause. You can smell it, but you do not have it.

There is a story of flat land. It is compelling. It is about a sphere attemping to describe itself to the creatures who live in flat land, a two dimensional land. The sphere starts out as a point, then becomes a small circle that grows to a max, then shrinks back down to a point again. It is very hard for those on flat land to understand what the sphere is. Likewise, the added complexity, dimension, of electrical field impacts on cloud microphysics is unappreciated. This impact gets to viscosity, to the very weaknesses in the models, weather or climate. And the biological modulation of these fields–puts it together as a dampened oscillater, not a chaotic one, as the Real Climate folks would have you discuss. Another man with a gun–who will shoot you into silence, censor you, because he don’t know what it means.

I was also censored and kicked off of Michael Crichton’s bb for typing these substantive things. Not flaming–just having a third skeptical view. I will say this about Crichton’s gun–he has no idea what gaia cloud sorting and nucleotides were about and he has in his State of Fear a part where a radio or a cell phone is programmed to attract lightning. It shows that he has NO IDEA how electrical atmospheric phenonmenon works whatsoever.

That’s another book where there is the discussion on the Peter Doran (no relation) research on Antarctica but fails to discuss the difference in INDUCTION and IMPEDENCE that a moving ocean current like the Southern Ocean and its circumpolar would have on capactive couplings and then, therefore, the nature and extent of surface low movements bringing warm wet air south. The currents near where the warm anomalies have been found move 180 degrees the other way, and that is going to cause opposing current flow given the earth EMF and that moving conductor. The point is, what he is looking at is again, a DEPENDANT deal, where CO2 impacts conductivity . . . and Crichton is another man with a gun who don’t know what it means.

Steve, I don’t think that RC should censor you, but I also don’t think you should censor me, something you have done repeatedly. You allow John A to make attacks on me and then you delete my comments when I defend myself and make vile personal attacks on me just because I do defend myself.

I note that the censorship continues in this thread, with Dave Dardinger’s comment being deleted because he suggested that John A should admit to being wrong.

The reasons you give for your repeated censorship aren’t even slightly credible. Discussions of other aspects of physics relating to climate have been allowed, but you won’t allow a discussion on the physics of averaging temperature on a blog that is basically about averaging temperature. So the question must be asked: Is Steve McIntyre Honest?

Steve, I don’t think that RC should censor you, but I also don’t think you should censor me, something you have done repeatedly. You allow John A to make attacks on me and then you delete my comments when I defend myself and make vile personal attacks on me just because I do defend myself.

I don’t do private fault finding. If something won’t stand up to a public airing, I’m not interested. I’m certainly not interested in discussing ‘private’ info with people. Myself, I’m not into the pseudonym thing, but I recognize the need for it for a limited group of people.

Re #248: Tim, you object to my not discussing the "physics of averaging temperature on a blog that is basically about averaging temperature." I have never posted on the topic of "averaging temperature". I’m not interested in hosting a debate on thermodynamics based on a casual comment deep in a thread. There are other venues. If someone wants to get into creationism, it would be the same. As to snipping Dave D, while he criticized John A, my concern was that he ventured into a substantive discussion of entropy, which was going to spiral into a topic of its own. Maybe at some time in the future, I’ll look into entropy issues and we can discuss it, but for now, I don’t know enough about the matter to host a discussion. I don’t see why you have so much trouble understanding this.

I have tried to be evenhanded in this. I have been very light in snipping you; you’ve had lots of opportunities to make your points and I snip or delete John A as much or more than you.

The problem is when you hijack threads to beat your hobbyhorses. There are actually some people who come here because of the menu of topics that I’ve intitiated and some of them complain when threads get hijacked. There are a vast number of topics which have been raised and surely there is something here than would interest you. I’ve got the same problem with you as with Methane Mike. I don’t doubt the sincerity of some of his comments, but the difficulty is the hijacking of threads.

In contrast to your hijacking threads to discuss unrelated topics, the deleted posts at realclimate were exactly on point, had not been raised at the site and were direct responses by me to criticisms of me in the post. If you can’t appreciate the distinction, then too bad for you.

Incredible. You raised the issue, making a vile personal attack on me by likening me to s sexual deviant and you claim that I’m thread hijacking?

I am bemused by your claim that you haven’t posted about averaging temperatures. Last time I checked the hockey stick graph was a graph of average temperatures.

And using complaints from your readers as justification for censoring discussion? I haven’t seen such complaints, but I have seen specific requests from Dave Dardinger and TCO that you allow such a discussion. You could satisfy everyone by having a post where such discussion could occur. But you won’t because you know that John A is wrong and you are determined to cover up for him.

Have you ever seen this link? What it shows is where the strongest winds for Wilma where. And the relative pressures drop when the hurricane passes too, so it’s like taking your beer and shaking it–then you open it. What happens?

What Bates et al in Nature found is that CO2 comes out of solution in the oceans down to 200 ppm and it takes at least two weeks for the partial pressure to recover. What I am saying is that this has a conductivity meaning–the CO2 coming out of solution–it is the very mechanism that helps the capacitive couplings that organize the cloud microphysics, and cause a hurricane to be a pin hole, such as Wilma was when it set a barametric pressure record for the Atlantic at 882 mbs, or a cyclops, when it caused 9 billion dollars of damage to Florida.

Again, please explain your use of the Dane research on cosmic ray flux–why you did not describe the possibility that CO2 has a forcing meaning other than as a GHG. That water is your key GHG, and that CO2 may force cloud behaviors in a different mechanism that you have suggested in your book on skepticism.

At least have the politeness to respond to the question. Or I won’t waste either of our time.

Katrina was powered by about 60k strikes over the CONUS when she blew up. I have images of those strikes I saved if anyone is interested.

Rita blew up with about 40 k strikes over the CONUS, but substantially more strikes to her south and west and east.

Wilma was almost entirely powered by strikes in South and Central America, which could be seen by cloud top temps and thunderstorm looking patterns from this links:

http://www.weather.unisys.com/hurricane and go to the IR shots of the Pacific and Atlantic. Presently at this link you can see that we are getting hit on the left coast with some pretty good rain. The rainy season here starts when the Atlantic is not conductive enough for tropical storm capactive couplings to occur and the strikes in South and Central America begin to power and pattern moisture from the Pacific. Rain typically occurs when the SOI is rising positive–as that is when the tropical Pacific has CO2 coming out of solution in such a manner as to increase the probability of such couplings to provide mechanism for storms tracking to the west coast.

Mike I have no idea what you are talking about. I think you have confused me with somebody else. I have never cited the Dane research and have no idea what it is. Nor have I written a book on skepiticism.

Tim, I have received email complaints offline about certain topics running amok. I have no idea whether John A is right or wrong on entropy. I just don’t want to discuss here until I’m in a position to decide.

It doesn’t matter to me whether he’s right or wrong. The point was made in passing in a threaded comment. If your best shot against climateaudit is that, out of the hundreds of posts that I’ve made, you have found a comment by a computer consultant that you think is incorrect, I’ll take that as a ringing endorsement of the points made in this blog.

You have repetitively intruded your hobbyhorses regarding two topics with which I am not involved – average temperature of Essex and McKitrick; and entropy – into other threads. I’ve asked you to stop politely and you’ve disregarded the request.

My comparison was needlessly graphic and I apologize for that, but I’m tired of your behavior on these topics. So let’s dial it back by both of us. I’ve excised the offending phrase.

If I put a beef about RE statistics into a realclimate thread on hurricanes, I’d have no problem with Gavin excising it; it’s different if the thread is about statistics.

As usual, you are mispresenting things. You raised the issue in this thread in order to attack me yet again. Again, you raised the issue, not me. I ignored your previous nasty little jibes but enough was enough.

You also misrepresent the context of John A’s comment. I didn’t just leap on some trifling error by John A — he attacked me, falsely claiming that I didn’t understand basic physics, and he has repeated his bogus claim many times, using the cover you have provided him to avoid justifying it. In fact, all four of my posts where I mention CA involve me correcting false statements about me made here. So the universe of CA postings I am drawing is the that of postings about me. And all of them have contained serious factual errors. This does not give me confidence in you.

And you don’t have to decide who is right or wrong on entropy — all you have to do is allow a discussion on its own post. You’ve allowed discussion on many other topics, why is this the topic that cannot be discussed? I also note that in the very post that started this thread you demanded yet again that I blog about one of your hobby horses. Apparently you feel that I have to blog about whatever you want but you feel no reciprocal obligation.

And if you really are ignorant of the truth on the entropy question, well, you must be working real hard to stay that way because it’s not even slightly hard to figure out — energy and entropy are measured in different units. Duh.

Why would you think Tim cares if Steve gets ‘good stuff’ done? He’s just a troll around here. And he seems to be so self-absorbed that he has to come around whenever anything bad is said about him. Like I even ever heard of him before this blog started.

re: 259, Tim, could I ask you please to dial it back a trifle? I know that you are upset, but you do yourself no good by raging … it merely confirms some of the harsher comments about your postings.

One thing I want to comment on. You say:

Apparently you feel that I have to blog about whatever you want but you feel no reciprocal obligation.

Yep. You got it in one. That’s how it works when you have your own blog. You get to make the rules however you want.

The reality is that it is Steve’s blog, and it is up to him alone what threads to allow. He receives a variety of posts (including yours) asking him to open a thread on a particular subject. Commendably, he has done so on some occasions. Equally commendably, he has not done so on some occasions. Unlike some of the dear folks who post here, he tends to limit his comments and his threads to subjects he actually knows something about. This, to me, is a very reasonable limitation, and it is one he has explained to you more than once..

You seem to think that he is under some obligation to open a thread because you, or anyone, demands it.

I, on the other hand, think he is under no obligation at all to do that. He has been more than generous, and even humorous, with allowing people to post. All he asks is that it be on topic, and not flame anyone. He is infinitely more honest, and more patient, than RC in that regard.

If you would like to have a thread somewhere on the web regarding entropy, or enthalpy, or ecstasy, or whatever floats your boat, that’s OK with me.

But insisting that another man provide the forum to host your thoughts, claims, ideas, and occassional nasty comments as though you had a right to be heard on another mans blog … sorry, bro’. Doesn’t work that way, and you just come off as a spoiled child for demanding it.

Willis: I think it is a little more complex than this. John A has created posts and is a moderator on the site. Thus I think that the site bears some responsibility to allow discussion of points that he brings up. If not, why did John A raise the topic in the first place?

It’s still Steve’s blog. John A does what he does with Steve’s blessing. If Steve doesn’t like what John A does, I’m sure Steve let’s John know. I’m sure there’s communication between John A and Steve about these types of issues.

Sheesh… some of you can’t deal with actual science topics at hand and you have to get into all sorts of people issues*. This reminds me of an engineer I once worked for. He had an office of 30+ people. One day, he realized he wasn’t doing any engineering, he was managing people all day long. He downsized. When I was working for him, he was down to 3 employees, and after I quit, he was down to 0. Managing the people was more of headache than anything else. After following some of you on this blog, I can certainly see why.

* This isn’t a comment on the existance of this thread–it’s pertinent to purpose of this site.

:Let’s distinguish between posts and comments on posts. There has never been a post at this site on entropy. If there had been, I would agree that it would have to play out.

In some thread, John A. made a comment on a post that involved a controversy on entropy. Again, this was not a post. Had it been a post, I would have taken it down. I told John A. at the same time that I told Tim, that they could step outside for this discussion. I asked John A to lay off the topic.

I take no position on the matter. John A. might be wrong, he might be right. I don’t know and I’ve got too much to do to find out. If he were wrong, it would not affect any of the various posts that I’ve made on topics that I know about.

As to your post alleging various misrepresentations about you, I disagree with you. I’ve parsed through your comments before. I’ve got other things to do than parse through them one more time.

Tim, I’ll make you a deal. If you put up a post at your blog fully discussing Mann’s cos latitude errors entitled Mann Screws It Up Again! and fully criticizing realclimate censorship – no half measures or backhands, the Full Monty as you well know how to do, then I’ll post something on entropy, which you can discuss to your heart’s content. Otherwise give it a rest.

He didn’t raise it on this site, numskull. Now if anyone wants to complain, complain about me. I’m not getting enough attention. Steve tolerates my antics and has a double standard (I looove the double standard, which allows me to misbehave and others not. That should make you angry and cry. I am the ubertroll! Fear me!

I think it’s worthwhile to correct some of Steve McIntyre’s misrepresentations in this thread. He claimed that I “have repetitively intruded your hobbyhorses regarding two topics with which I am not involved – average temperature of Essex and McKitrick; and entropy – into other threads.”

In fact, I have never introduced average temperature to a thread here. Never. As for entropy, that started when John A claimed

You should know that Lambert’s scientific knowledge is *ahem* “challenged”. Ask him if he’s discovered what entropy is and how it applies to closed thermodynamic systems.

I didn’t hijack the discussion after this — I posted on my own blog, but John A refused to discuss the matter there. Since then we’ve seen the John-Steve two step: Steve censors any discussion of the matter, providing cover for John to pretend to be willing to discuss it, even though that is the last thing he wants to do. Steve allows discussion on every other aspect of climate science even when it is wildly off-topic and longwinded. It’s just this own topic that is forbidden, for reason that are not even slightly believable.

I’ve only introduced the entropy thing in three threads here. The first was here. I corrected comments on my blog that erroneously implicated Steve in McKitrick’s degrees/radians screwup, but Steve would not return the favour by correcting John’s erronous attack on me, instead continuing his on-going cover up.

The second time actually was a thread hijack but it was done in self-defence since the thread was created with the specific purpose of abusing me and calling me names.

The third time was to make a point about censorship which CA immediately made for me by censoring my comment.

And that’s all. Hardly makes its a hobby horse.

Steve: I have already posted on Mann’s sqrt cos thing, but I’ll do a post on censorship by blogs with Climate in their name. I’ll expect your post on entropy to follow shortly.

Let it go…give it a rest. You feel some guy on some blog appears to be censoring you. So? Big deal. Don’t you have your own blog? Doesn’t RC allow you to post to your heart’s content? And, last time I looked, there’s precious little censoring of true debate going on here… in fact, there’s very little in the way of defense of the science and math that’s being debated here.

Feel confident in your manhood and post science. Stop worrying about the petty stuff. And, as Hans has posted, why not comment on “‘scientists’ hiding their methods and data?”

Paul, your comments would seem to be better directed towards Steve. All I’ve done is post a cpuple of comments here after Steve made another one of his nasty attacks on me. Steve has a post with multiple updates and he’s been egging everyone in comments here to condemn the evil monsters at RC.

Hans, I’m pretty sure I have blogged on scientists hiding their methods and data. It hink it might have been somewhere here.

TCO, your trolling isn’t usually this lame. Are you unwell? If you are, I hope you get better soon.

It’s always fascinating when Tim accuses others of censorship, making vile attacks and trolling. It draws a tear to the eye. With the way he’s treated actual scientists, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that he’d actually accept the normal process of debate, let alone actual mathematics.

I wouldn’t wish to comment on Lambert’s blog, because [snip] and c) if he was in danger of accepting it, he’d delete my comments and ban me.

Since Steve has no wish to host this particular debate, that means unless there is some neutral ground where Tim couldn’t a) troll b) delete c) ban or d) leave when he’s losing, that means I’m not going to debate him.

In #279, Steve McIntyre deletes my comment to Tim Lambert, and writes, “Mark – please do this elsewhere: what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I’m trying to leave for England so everyone please behve while I’m offline.”

If so, don’t you think it’s important to know whether or not there’s a simple relationship between atmospheric temperature changes and atmospheric energy (more properly, enthalpy) changes?

For example, suppose I told you that a 1 kilometer cube of air outside Phoenix Arizona increased in temperature by 0.6 degrees Celsius from 1980 to 2005, and a 1 kilometer cube of air outside Orlando, Florida decreased in temperature by 0.5 degrees Celsius in that same period.

Isn’t it relevant to your site’s goal to know whether it is scientifically valid to simply add the temperature changes of those cubes of air (i.e., “+0.6 – 0.5 = +0.1”) and use that resulting temperature change to make a claim about the net change in enthalpy of those two cubes of air (e.g., “the enthalpy of those combined chunks of air has increased by m * Cp * 0.1 degree Celsius”)?

I think the answer is Mark, is that Steve does not wish to host arguments that he has not made. He even censors my replies to enforce that. The claims you refer to are from Tim Lambert, so either you take the argument to Lambert’s blog, or somewhere else but not here.

I think that unless Steve changes his mind on the subject, it would be futile to continue the discussion here. My assumption is that Steve has not studied thermodynamics in detail. If Ross McKitrick ran this blog (or co-ran it) then I’m sure this discussion would be hosted here.

But its not so it’s not going to be. I don’t agree with it, but it’s not my blog.

While Steve is offline, I’m going to enforce his wishes in the matter. I won’t discuss thermodynamics here and I would ask everyone to refrain fron doing so.

I’m not going to snip posts that have mentioned it, but I will do so from now on, especially to prevent arguments later on that Steve doesn’t want to be using up his bandwidth and disk space.

“I’ve done is post a cpuple of comments here after Steve made another one of his nasty attacks on me.”

Is this really Tim Lambert ? Of Doltoid ? Complaining about harsh language ? The man who (for example) accused a Professor of electrical engineering of being innumerate and a crank ?
What do you call someone who dislikes being called names himself, but loves to call others names ?

John A. writes, “I think the answer is Mark, is that Steve does not wish to host arguments that he has not made. He even censors my replies to enforce that. The claims you refer to are from Tim Lambert, so either you take the argument to Lambert’s blog, or somewhere else but not here.”

Well, that’s a little puzzling, since just today I happened to find this comment (a few months old) of Steve’s right here at Climate Audit:

After being challenged by Bahner with what seem to me to be worthwhile questions and exactly on topic, Lambert refused to answer the questions saying:

“Answer your [own] questions and gain the privilege of being able to post comments here. Until then, you may not post here.”

I thought that Lambert wanted to talk about thermodynamics. Now he shut down discussion with someone knowledgeable on the topic.

I think that unless Steve changes his mind on the subject, it would be futile to continue the discussion here. My assumption is that Steve has not studied thermodynamics in detail.

My (educated) assumption is that Tim Lambert definitely also “has not studied thermodynamics in detail.” But there’s apparently a difference between Steve and Tim Lambert. Steve apparently doesn’t like to pretend he knows about subjects of which he is ignorant. That definitely doesn’t apply to Tim Lambert. Even though Tim Lambert makes such laughable statements as:

“Wow. I guess we’ll just have to ditch the entire field of thermodynamics then. In fact, Temperature T and internal energy U are related by the formula
àÅ½”¬?U=àÅ½”¬?T*m*c
where m is the mass and c the specific heat. It is true that it is possible for internal energy to change without affecting the temperature if there is a phase change, but the atmosphere stays way above the temperature of liquid nitrogen, so this makes almost no difference to temperatures.”

…and…

“I mentioned nitrogen because that is what the atmosphere mostly is. Water vapour is less than 0.5% of the atmosphere. And the equation is true for water vapour as well if there is no phase change. The equation I gave is actually a very (close) approximation. Do you also complain that Newtonain physics is the wrong way to describe the atmosphere because it doesn’t account for relativistic effects?”

…Tim Lambert STILL likes to pretend he knows something about thermodynamics. In fact, he likes to pretend he knows more about the relationship between atmospheric temperature and atmospheric enthalpy than I do.

But I don’t think Tim Lambert would ever put his money where his mouth is. In fact, I don’t think he will even put MY money where his mouth is. (In this way, he’s sort of like William Connolley and James Annan…not to mention Gavin Schmidt).

Specifically, I will give Tim Lambert $10 if he can correctly label the following assertion as “true” or “false,” and give a brief (or lengthy) explanation for his answer:

“Surface air temperature alone is inadequate to monitor trends of surface heating and cooling. The SI units for temperature are degrees Kelvin (or Celsius), and the SI units for heat are Joules. The surface temperature can go up while the enthalpy goes down or remains the same. The surface temperature can go down while the enthalpy goes up or remains the same. The surface temperature can remain the same while the enthalpy goes down or up.”

I will also give Tim Lambert $10 if he has the honesty to admit he has never had a course in Thermodynamics (at the university level). (Or I’ll give him $10 if he can provide credible evidence that he did ever take a course in Thermodynamics.)

2. I’ve taken course in thermo, but I can never remember the tricky stuff. Fugacity. constant pressure. Adiabatic. yada yada. I know enough to know that John smelled slightly more ignorant than tim and both more than me and I know that I don’t have it down myself. They don’t seem to know enought to know that they don’t have it down, though.

3. I’ll bite on your para. Feel free to dock or pay the $10 (let’s send to charity of choice.): I think that all statements of fact are true. First sentence is really more a statement of argument. I mean, you could technically say that classical kinematics is insufficient because of relativistic effects, but someone arguing the real world of speeding a car, would say that all you need to know is F=ma and you can’t push a rope… I don’t have a good feel in the real world of climate if the first argument is (reasonably true or not). Some things that would worry me have to do with circulation to the deep ocean heat sink and the like. Also (obviously) ice melting and the like. From a definitional stanpoint, it is interesting to think what surface is in temp of surface and in heat content of or heat transfer accross surface. Are we talking a plane here, is the surface that we think of with temp measurement the same one that is relevant for heat content, etc.

Regarding #290: TCO, the offer is only open to Tim Lambert (because Tim Lambert is the “expert” on thermodynamics). I’m offering Tim Lambert $10 if he can correctly identify whether the following assertion (paragraph) is “true” or “false,” and can explain why:

“Surface air temperature alone is inadequate to monitor trends of surface heating and cooling. The SI units for temperature are degrees Kelvin (or Celsius), and the SI units for heat are Joules. The surface temperature can go up while the enthalpy goes down or remains the same. The surface temperature can go down while the enthalpy goes up or remains the same. The surface temperature can remain the same while the enthalpy goes down or up.”

I don’t think he will ever bother to take my offer. (It’s not like he’s going to have the honesty to admit he’s been wrong for the past year-and-a-half!)

And I also think he doesn’t have the honesty to admit he’s never had a course in Thermodynamics.

P.S. Actually, Thermodynamics isn’t really the best course to take, to answer the question. A much more relevant course would be a course in Heating and Air Conditioning. (Which I can virtually guarantee Tim Lambert has never taken. In fact, I’ll give him $40 if he can provide credible evidence he’s taken such a course at the university level.)

Since Steve has no wish to host this particular debate, that means unless there is some neutral ground where Tim couldn’t a) troll b) delete c) ban or d) leave when he’s losing, that means I’m not going to debate him.

Mark & others bring up salient points — a thermometer reading (even the MSU sat temps) don’t account for latent heat of H2O. IOW, even if these measurements were accurate & global, the “real” total atmos heat is unknown w/o measuring H2O content — Pielke Sr has stressed this on his website. The total energy could be constant or even dropping when the straight temps were rising!

Another point is that if H2O already “covers”, to varying extent, CO2’s absorption bands, then CO2 would only produce a radiational effect where H2O wasn’t already present in enough quantity. So the CO2 radiational effect wouldn’t be “global” — it’d be limited to dry tropospheric areas, obstensibly the poles & perhaps dry deserts & subtropical highs.

I’m just an informed layman in these matters, so I could be out in left field…

A further data point on the RC discussion. My paper at Warwick Hughes website (http://www.warwickhughes.com/cool/cool10.htm) was recently criticised on RC. I posted a reply, and it was published on RC. First thing they ever let me publish … go figure.

HI folks. I am an idiot. I have no science background. I do not possess a degree in anything. I have a couple points to make. Take them or leave them.

The Earth is a planet. Planets do not care if they have life on them. Inteligent beings, like humans, care. Humans for the most part are like me, stupid. We care because we have hot wired in our brains the desire to continue. This desire is so strong, that we will argue for years and years what we should or shouldn’t do to protect the lucky planet we happen to reside on. Once again, most of us are idiots. We have no idea what we are talking about, we have no true facts to tell us otherwise, and we have a limited collective intelect to understand such things.

“You there from the back.” **Bad points off camera**

“What about the smart people?” a plucky young scientist asks.

The smart people are, well, smart. They know better than to get involved with silly issues like this. They leave it to the idiots to try to figure out, and profit. How they profit, I don’t know, to stupid to figure it out.

Why are smart people so wise? Genetics? I have no clue. I’m stupid remember.

Here is a summary of my points.

1) Humans are mostly stupid (ignorant if you prefer) and will argue forever what they think the best thing to do with the rock we live on.

2) This giant rock we live on is completely insignificant to the universe, and anything beyond. Earth does not love us, Earth doesn’t care if Humanity or any other form of life live here. The Earth will be here in some form for much much longer than us, wether we cause our destruction or not.

3) Never underestimate the Human desire to live. It will suprise you. Horror movies are trash. Want to see real human struggle for life, watch the news or cops. You won’t see people fight as hard or run as fast in your life.

4) All life has the desire to live hard lined. The meaning of life is to live. Live and make more life. So simple, yet so ellusive.

5) Your arguements will never be amicably settled. You will never get the “other guys” to see your point and you will never submit to theirs.

6) The environment will eventually change. Everything changes. The Environment will change wether we cause it or not. I am personally waiting for something like all the oxygen in the atmosphere to suddenly turn to ozone and kill us all. You know, something completely unexpected, and would be considered impossible if anyone survived.

Please be patient. Your comments are still in the
moderation queue. I don’t have the authority to pass these comments, so I have to wait for one of the lead authors to do it.

[my first submission, ~7:30] Quite Ironic !Isn’t this reflective of the same basic argument that M&M [the Climateaudit people] have been making for several years ? – That the claims of scientists should be checked before they are allowed to affect substantive public policy ? [Forget for a moment whether any of their other claims have merit or not.]Doesn’t this make sense ? The ecological and economic effects are too great to let anybody stall or turbocharge government response without their work being checked. Of course, it would make imminent sense for government to fund training and work of scientists doing the checking. by jim edwards

[my second submission, ~8:30]
Is there a reason my comment wasn’t good enough to post, but comment #2 [for instance] was somehow more on point or added to the community’s understanding of the relevant issue ? "A Mistake With Repercussions" argues that VonStorch made a mistake when he did his work, and that there were serious adverse public policy implications. I’ll accept that this is correct. Doesn’t this support the general point that the scientific community should be allowed to verify claims before members of Congress start swinging the hammer ? I repeat my previous post submission:Quite Ironic !Isn’t this reflective of the same basic argument that M&M [the Climateaudit people] have been making for several years ? – That the claims of scientists should be checked before they are allowed to affect substantive public policy ? [Forget for a moment whether any of their other claims have
merit or not.]Doesn’t this make sense ? The ecological and economic effects are too great to let anybody stall or turbocharge government response without their work being checked. Of course, it would make imminent sense for government to fund training and work of scientists doing the checking. by jim Edwards

It seems that there is a higher de jure level of signoff required for the skeptic posts. And (de facto) a higher bar to cross to even get posted (less temperate or less well reasoned posts will get on the site if they are on the “friendly” side of the argument. Hence all of Lynn’s drivel.)

Posted at RC at 0915 in the Von Storch mistake thread (in case they don’t let it on):

Response to Gavin’s “in the post” response to my #1. In certain regimes (speeds), Newtonian mechanics is equivalent to relativity. In other regimes, it is dramatically inadequate. If the difference affects the answer significantly, then (yes), the Newtonian work is WRONG. If it doesn’t affect the answer significantly, then bringing in the newly discovered GR, is a non sequiter. If it’s in a regime where both are equivalent, then mistakes found in a method relying on Newtonian assumptions will also be mistakes with GR assumptions.

I almost get the impression that the comments about new methods and such are an attempt to deflect criticism of the earlier work. Think about it this way, Gavin (made up example):
A. The unit cell of gold was determined in 1900 to be 1.00 Angstroms using a lab scale X-ray diffractometer.
B. Now, in 2000, comes out a paper using synchrotron radiation updating the earlier result and showin 1.0014 Angstroms to be the unit cell size.
C. I come back and re-examine the earlier paper and see that they made an incorrect assumption of space group. The unit cell must be 1.50 Angstroms.
D. Analysis: the updated method is irrelevant to the critique of the earlier work. If it were relevant than it would have (in addition to using a more powerful X-ray) have corrected the earlier paper’s space group and shown that the unit cell was 1.5021.
E. Capisce? 😉

P.s. Please do not censor this post. If you value truth-seeking and debate, you need to allow replies to replies and let the discussion proceed. If you are weary of the subject, I will understand if you don’t continue discussion. But I don’t agree with the policy of “on high reply” and then disallowing a response.

it is very difficult for me to reconcile this commentary, with its talk of “error”s and “mistakes”, with the reply published in Science by von Storch. Although it says above that “Zorita and Von Storch admit their error in passing…”, I see no point at which Z and VS describe their work as an error. Indeed, von storch et al seem to be quite happy with what they did, and that their conclusions are robust !

Could it possibly be that the reason for the partisan stance and inflammatory adjectives in the blog posting above is much more closely linked to the fact that some of the blog authors “suffered a major challenge to their scientific reputations ” from the VS work ?
yours
per

I need to read more of the details of the individyual papers and such to really tell. I think all of these guys (including Steve*…but he’s better than most) tend to be a bit opaque and not cut to the basics that allow settling an argument.

A. My comment got in and I think I’ve made my point sufficiently. At this point, Gain and I are in agreement. I will just remake it, if I see later tendancy of Mannites to try to deflect criticism of MBH98 by appeal to the new work. (“Moveon.org argument”).

B. I have another post in que. (I think that I’m not on the “quick approve” list.)

I’m also (very) interested in the comments about the Burger and Cubash paper implications.

1. That paper was very critical of work and conclusions from some of the authors of this blog (of MBH98) and presented a very interesting analysis to show this. This blog’s author’s hjave nefver directly addressed B&C’s main thesis. The “full factorial of 64 methods” that shows significant differences in the reconstruction by making changes to the method. (I’m not saying you don’t have a response…but you haven’t made it.)

2. In the arena of this particular topic, I wonder if your implied criticism of B&C for using the detrended data affects their central thesis? Does the graphic showing significant variablity for the 64 method variations collapse if non-detrended data is used? Or is this a side issue?

C. (I hate putting the comments at the bottom about “you should post this” in my RC postings. I’m reminded of the newspaper editor who (without mercy) trashed any letter to the editor that had a “you won’t dare print this” aside. However, my impression is that such comments actually do help my posts get on the site (as does cross-posting here). Almost as if they will do the right thing, when pushed.

Eli must be on the “approved” list and I on the “watched” list (at RC). My post number 15 was actually put on the blog in a way that interposed it with the Eli post. His post had made it on earlier. I don’t think this is good practice as it is likely to get comments by number mixed up.

Re # 15 Gavin (in the post) reply:
-If there is a strong case, it would be interesting to see it argued.
– As would an overall examination of that paper in a posting on this blog. I found the paper quite elegant. Even if it is wrong, you ought to examine it and show it to your readers and discuss the issues in it. Open source discussion proceeds in this manner. Also, one can think of Feynmann who said that it is the duty of every scientist to include the things that might argue against his conclusions.
-There was a very interesting comment in B&C about the methodology in MBH98. That the reasons for choices of method were not numerically described….that the rationales tended to be verbal wording like “strong” or “robust” that was not proven or quanitifed.

In my chosen profession, which is not “science,” it is important to show your work to others. It’s important for them to look critically at what you’re trying to accomplish and suggest ways to improve. Sometimes you’ll get the message that you failed completely. You suck it up, go back to the drawing board, and try again. Having people critically look at your work makes better work.

Another post-saver (proof that I submitted). Note that my earlier (very temperate, on topic–more so than several in the string, and content-filled, but “anti-what they want to hear”) post was evidently killed. They won’t brook a real debate on the science over there.

I’m concerned that this posting only shows one side of the story. VZGT agree that they used detrended and that this did not perfrectly emulate the MBH algorithm. However they assert that the main critism of MBH remains (although reduced in extent) by not detrending. They also provide reasons why detrending is more appropriate (given the red noise and confounding factors inherent in tree rings). Full details available in their published reply to the Amman paper is here:

Censor caveat: Even though Amman and Mike Mann are authors of this blog, you owe it to show both sides of the debate, including those which you disagree with or which hurt you. Please allow the post.

Content note: Actually I find both the Amman and VS papers a little inadequate in sorting out the actual dimensions of the choice of method and the reasons for doing one or the other. I do see some real value in the Amman paper (they had a relevant point). But I think they (or you in RC) wax tendentious when trying to trash the whole paper without proving extent. Burger and Cubash is still the best paper in the mini-industry of criticizing Mike Mann’s seminal paper…

Another RC post attempt. Note that my last couple have been very temperate, reasoned on topic posts. They have not let them on, but have let some pretty off-topic posts from the cheering section occur.

Further commentary to Gavin’s in the post reply to my #15:

I went and looked back at the Burger and Cubasch paper. They are completely clear about MBH using trended and VS using detrended. The commentary in the initial post makes it seem as if they “carried VS’s error forward”. Actually they completely see the difference (if it were a discovery to not this difference B&C got it into print before WRA). As Gavin’s in the post comment says, what they do is list this as one more “flavor” of how to to MBH style work. So obviously Gavin understands the paper–I just don’t think the top post is clear (fair) to Burger and Cubasch.

WRT Gavin’s comment that detrending (or rescaling) are beyond the pale determined as to which method to use, I think that is still in debate and a more quantitative rationale needs to be put forward for why these “flavors” are preferred. Especially (as WRA and B&C show) since choice of flavor DOES affect the resultant answer materially. The commentary in B&C says that the MBH rationales for their flavors are verbal (“insensative” and the like) rather than quantitative.

If the goal is to get the post in, don’t push the button. In this case the post got in and the word “censor” even got in. In their mind “let debate occur” equals “Buster, you are a censor!” and as he said: “the comments about censorship are tedious and I’m minded to follow precedent and automatically toss any comments that ‘dare me to print them’. ”

Not sure if they are annoyed by “Moderator caveat: Respectfully ask that you publish my post. ” seems harmless to me.

Note: The Realclimate posting policy statement has been modified since this thread, the “Is Gavin Schmidt Honest?” thread was posted.

samples:

“We use moderation to improve the “signal to noise” in the discussion. ”
“We reserve the right to either reject comments that do not meet the above criteria… ”
“We cannot insure uniform application of the various considerations listed above from one individual comment to the next. ”
“Repeat offenders of our comments policy (in particular, individuals demonstrating a pattern of “trolling”) may be barred from future access to the blog. “

No-one is labelling genuine skeptics as septics. We/I am labelling those who are not skeptics, but who have an irrational and prejudiced disbelief against GW. Milloy for example. They need a label – what would you propose? – William

Jeff Alexander:

The label I prefer is “denier” as in Holocaust denial. It indicates someone who deliberately misinterprets or ignores the evidence.

If that’s the signal, then I’m glad to be part of the noise. Of course neither Jeff nor William comprehend how insulting it is to compare skepticism of a scientific hypothesis with denial of a truly terrible event of 20th Century history. I don’t think they’ll ever comprehend it.

Last post got in. I’m still bothered that the other two didn’t. Per gavin’s request, I will refrain from the moderator comments. ONly reason I put them there was the honest expereince that my comments got published more when they had them.

I have a reply to Gavin’s latest comment on trending/detrending which brings in the idea that this is still in debate, red noise issue, etc. But I’m really getting sick of commenting over there, batting 505 with getting stuff on and having to back my posts up by shadow posting. I guess he can have the field and he can enjoy the Lynn style comments.

#319. I wonder if realclimate learned the following from dendrochronology:

“We use moderation to improve the “signal to noise” in the discussion. “

Compare that to Esper’s statement about dendro:

this does not mean that one could not improve a chronology by reducing the number of series used if the purpose of removing samples is to enhance a desired signal. The ability to pick and choose which samples to use is an advantage unique to dendroclimatology. That said, it begs the question: how low can we go?

After reading the anti-Von Storch post over at RC, I had this eerie feeling that I sometimes get from their posts. Von Storch had committed a major-league error that was completely refuted by a comment, … but there was no mention of whether Von Storch had a reply of any sort.

So I went looking. It wasn’t very difficult. I looked at Von Storch’s website, and there at the top was a rebuttal to the comment with a link to — of all things — a detailed response published ALONGSIDE THE COMMENT.

But RC didn’t see fit to discuss the reply, or link to it, or even acknowledge that it existed.

Yeah: RC wouldn’t post my comment either (with good content on topic, reasoned argument), but that included a link to the VS reply. It is damning that they won’t put the two peices up side by side and let people make a judgment.

Here is my latest:

Gavin,

My point is that if the choice is not arbitrary, you need to prove the case for one versus the other. Given that VS have a reply to ARW and that they argue the point (red noise, blabla), it is not a no-brainer. So you have to prove your side of the story. Not just assert it.

Also of interest is that in the original MBH, the author’s made comments about the results being “insensative” to the method options (variance rescaling and detrending). Burger and Cubash CLEARLY show that the answers are NOT insensative. Their graphic shows the spaghetti snaking madly for the 64 different flavors. Now, you can retreat to trying to argue why your choice of flavor is right, but it’s fascinating that initially, the claim was for “insensativity”.

I love the arrogance of this one in VS comment. I should try it next time I get something rejected.

And it was in fact spotted very soon after publication. In January 2005, a comment was submitted to Science which correctly pointed out that Von Storch et al. had calibrated with detrended data and had therefore not tested the Mann et al. method. As such comments are routinely passed to the original authors for a response, Von Storch et al. must have become aware of their mistake at this point at the latest. However, the comment was rejected by Science in May 2005.

A comment is usually rejected because it is judged of insufficient quality or relevance to be published. Authors may disagree but generally treat the decision with dignity and humility. It is a kind of childish nah-nah-nah-nah-nah comment crowing they were right all along. It is also completely gratuitous in the context to talk about when VS was informed of the ‘mistake’. He does not regard it as a mistake. It not like he forgot to wash his glassware or something. It was a flavor of analysis.

Anyone clicking on the comment link (to Science) would have had a hard time missing the further link to the von S. et al reply. I saw it instantly.

Regarding whether there was a mistake, this comment near the beginning of the reply struck me as some sort of admission of an error:

“First, WRA06 are correct in that we implemented the method with detrended rather than nondetrended calibration, and that therefore our original analysis did not test the specific reconstruction method of MBH98. We show here that this difference is, however, not relevant for our main conclusion, although it does affect the magnitude of the reduction in variance.”

Steve, I agree that VS acknowledges the deviation. I just think it is worth reading their reply since they argue that the deviation does not change the answer much and is how one should do work anyhow. I don’t know who is right. I just think both sides should be looked at.

Re: 330. Steve, using the business analogy, imagine an analyst getting two reports (Wahl and VS reply) about an investment (the original VS article) and returning an assesment that mentioned one without the slightest reference to the other. How long do you think that analyst would keep his job? Terry is right to be wierded out by it – it is the antithesis of normal practise.

A mistake is something that one would do differently if done again. VS argues in their reply that 1. their choice was not material, and 2. that it is the correct choice. A mistake in this context would have to reverse or nullify the conclusion. It may be that the original could have been done better, or been argued stronger, but I don’t think Nature/Science publishes comments whose substance is only to point that out. The criteria are usually 1. could overturn the main conclusion or 2. adds additional material.

Why would anyone be surprised that realclimate would not discuss the VZ reply? They didn’t discuss or reference our replies to the VZ comment and the Huybers comment. Their failure to post my comment at realclimate was how this thread got started.

One thing that bugs me with all the “low frequency” and smoothing: I thought there was this big point that annual data was needed. But if you (in effect) partition into 30 year intervals, why bother with the annual data? Also, your degrees of freedom, become much smaller no? It’s not the actual years that is the number of data points, but the number of 30 year bins. Perhaps?

That’s the problem if you try to use correlation-based methods to calibrate things – remember there’s nothing physical.

That’s why I’m intrigued with these tree line studies or ecological niche studies to estimate low frequency results. They get away from the faux precision of Mannian tree ring chronologies and force people to think about things.

I’m concerned about ecological niche stuff just being another fancy whizbang. And that David’s blog had this big toodoo about housing prices without even having an appreciation of the most classical econ101 ideas of efficient market theory and asset appreciation to inform the modeling…well that bothered me.

One thing that bugs me with all the “low frequency” and smoothing: I thought there was this big point that annual data was needed. But if you (in effect) partition into 30 year intervals, why bother with the annual data? Also, your degrees of freedom, become much smaller no? It’s not the actual years that is the number of data points, but the number of 30 year bins. Perhaps?

I can’t find it on the thread right now – I searched “bugs”. Is it something that they’ve deleted in the past few minutes or is it still there?

In most cases you are doing modelling by correlation because you have no choice. You don’t have access to the variables you would really like so you use the ones you have. Its the case with niche modelling where you use climate variables for prediction. It was the case with house prices and its the case with climate modelling too. These CGCMs are parameterized in many ways with unmeasured or unmeasurable variables.

But there is a similarity in the argument you are making TCO and realclimate – the only acceptable way to model is to use the causal variables (or at least those variables that we think are causal). Consequently studies based on pure correlation, like all of the statistical time series stuff that shows lower 2XCO2 sensitivity, higher solar responses is deprecated because the causal mechanism isn’t explicit. I am not saying one or the other is better, just there are two different approaches with different strengths and limitations.

Usually modelling by correlation is cheaper, becuase you are using what you have. Full causal models require vast research programs the likes of NCAR. I don’t think causal models necessarily lead to better results in highly complex systems. With causal models, if you maintain that a model has to use something – efficient market theory or asset appreciation or something – you are already building a very strong bias into the model. If you say, well 99% of publications support that, then you are sounding like RC.

I don’t see anything wrong with approaching system analysis with minimal assumptions and seeing what pops out. You might be surprised. That’s data mining.

My real problem was that you are an economist and didn’t even have the econ101 insights to think about what you were doing. About what the price of an asset means, about pricing in future expectations.

#338, 341. TCO, you got posted with an VOG that evades the point. Your point about bins and loss of degrees of freedom is right. Stay with it. If the proxy doesn’t have high-frequency performance, and only low-frequency performance, you have only a couple of bins and no confidence intervals. You can’t distinguish between a valid temperature correlation and a spurious correlation with (say) dot.com stock prices. I’ve shown that the MBH-type reconstruction using dot.com stock prices and white noise is just as good as the actual one in terms of “low frequency” behavior”. They don’t have any escape.

Steve: I already know all this stuff. You don’t need to coach me. This is what I posted.

I get the point about the dating (knowing where you are), but that still doesn’t deal with the reduction in degrees of freedom of going to 30 year bins, no? Great, you’ve got the locations of the bins down gnat’s ass. But you don’t have more independant data.

One of the things that bugs me about these correlation procedures is the assumption of cause-effect, which is a big problem with correlations. Even beyond the degrees of freedom issue. It’s especially troublesome when there is cherry picking of the data.

There’s a thread around here somewhere that points out assumption number 1 in MBH98 is that cause-effect needs to be true, otherwise the analysis is meaningless. IMO, even if this assumption is proven, and proven linear for the temperature ranges in question, there’s no way it will work unless LOCAL temperatures are the basis… Sorry, but the temperature in China has no impact on Colorado, particularly when it is known that local variability is wildly different than the global mean variability.

In my considered opinion, all of dendroclimo is like Wiley E. Coyote standing in mid-air, several feet past the lip of the cliff, but not yet having looked down. The Canadian road runners are around the corner, waiting for the realization to hit.

PAt, check out realclimate as Gavin realizes the degrees of freedom problem if you are trying to low frequency validity AND high frequency failures. What’s the over/under on how long it takes Gavin to say that the issue is boring or merely contributing noise.

I don’t mean to suggest that worrying about the dendroclimo statistical methodology is sterile, Steve. Far from it. I think it’s critically important. You’re discovered, and revealed for us all, that the whole field needs a serious, nay fundamental, corrective. You’ve done a magnificent job, in my opinion, and your command of the details is amazing.

Like TCO, I’d like to see you publish your analyses. They are definitely at peer-journal level, and a paper including a full analysis of the linear algebra, as you’ve presented on your blog in some detail, would be very powerful. It would bring explicit mathematical credibility to the discussion, which would attract the attention of math-proficient scientists. That, in turn, would bring more analytically critical publications. It would also intimidate your critics, which could only be for the good, and silence Thacker those who smear your work as the opinions of “businessman McIntyre.”

It’s hard to understand how an entire field of science, with dozens of professionals, could have gone so wrong with no one inside it seeing the problems. I suspect the problem is that far too many use statistical tools without understanding the math. I’m guilty of that myself, and am commonly consulting physicists about the limits of what can be done with my data. In the case of dendroclimo, I think the problem was badly exacerbated by the workers having been intellectually stampeded by politics. Thank-you Steve B., ea.

Below is another post RealClimate declined on the anti Von Storch thread. I wonder why? (I entered it more than 24 hours ago, so I assume moderator lag isn’t the reason.)

When reading a post like this, I always wonder that the party being criticized has to say. Since your post doesn’t indicate if Von Storch has anything further to say on the subject, I took the liberty of looking at his website. At the top he has a post saying:

“A technical comment published in Science on 28 April 2006 points to a specific difference between the original method of Mann and colleagues and the analysis of this method by von Storch et al. (2004). This difference, however, does not alter the original conclusion by von Storch that the so-called “Hockey-Stick” reconstruction of past temperatures is likely an underestimation of past temperatures variations, as is demonstrated in a response published at the same time. (more details).”

“Gav: I think you agree that the data are not independant and that we don’t have the benefit of that many degrees of freedom as shown by the annual data. I agree that using 30 year bins would be extreme. But if there are trends which occur, then we need to account for this. So the right answer is somewhere in the middle. Certainly confidence intervals and degrees of freedom should not be based on a false beleif that the annual data are independant. And it’s not an issue of what we “need” in terms of number of bins in the instrument period, but of what is statistically justified.

Lynn: It’s irrelevant if people use the hockey stick attacks for “do nothing policy”. This site is not a policy site. It’s a climate site. If the hockey stick is bad science, we should expose it regardless of who misuses it. (and visa versa). To defend bad science for policy implications is tendentious. We would never want to be in the boat of Carl Sagan who advocated nuclear winter scenarios despite knowing how shaky the foundations for the science were, because that is how his politics went.”

“I believe Von Storch’s statement about this work being “nonsense”. Hasn’t Dr. Mann said he no longer uses the method? Don’t most reconstructions show more variability? It seems like entirely too much effort is put into defending it. This post is too much of a protest.”

It did not get in, maybe this will?

“The above post is a case of protesting too much. There are multiple lines of evidence that MBH98 has problems, yet there is no sense of accountability here. Instead we have a misdirection of blame. It’s all somebody else’s fault!”

Well…looks like my on the point (but uncomfortable) technical discussion is getting “the spike” at Real Climate. In the meantime, we have another Lynn post, some general GW concerns (not addressing VS) and a debate over what it means to end life on earth and how global climate change will drive that.

The one bright light is a quick comment by Burger of Burger and Cubasch questioning how the heck Gavin knows about rejections of his papers. I love the Burger paper and would love to see a pdf of the Tellus paper. Just recently reread the full factorial flavor paper and reminded myself how great that paper is. I wish there was more of an expansion of the part at the end of that paper. Where they leave the flavor discussion and get into the “range of variability” in the calibration versus the extrapolation areas. That is a whole different elephant from the full factorial.

Don’t you mean a poison pen piece by a left-wing activist? Just reading the titles of his column shows where he’s coming from. And there is no attack on the positions of the skeptics. It’s all ad industry nonsense. He complains about trivial donations to conservative organizations. I’ve checked these ExxonMobil donations before compared to the total incomes of the orgainizations and it’s typically a percent or two. Meanwhile even larger donations from the left to environmental organizations are ignored.

I could say more, but this isn’t really a thread designed for it. Maybe John A or Steve could move the posts somewhere else so people trying to find out what’s where on the site don’t have to get hit with propaganda from either side of the political spectrum.

Comment by Dave Dardinger “¢’¬? 11 May 2006 @ 4:31 pm | Edit This
#

Re: #50, “Meanwhile even larger donations from the left to environmental organizations are ignored.”

Few if any donations go to scientific research, however. Most of it goes to counter the lies, obfuscations, and confusion-provoking gobbledygook that the “conservative” think-tanks and PR firms put out through the big media conglomerates.

Also, regarding: “Don’t you mean a poison pen piece by a left-wing activist?”

What “left-wing activist”? Gutstein is a media analyst who attacks both “left-” and “right-wing” biases.

Also, Dave, did you hear about the evangelical Christians (i.e. “right-wingers”) who are trying to get something done to combat global warming? See below:

Steve B, do you want me to get a series of 10 straight articles by Mr. Gutstein and see just how many of them attack the right vs the left (and not just attack the center-left from the far-left either)?

And I agree that there are some Evangelicals who have gotten hoodwinked by the environmentalist movement.

Paranoia? No, it’s a knowledge of what guides the leftist mind. Not that I’m accusing the left of evil intentions, just a lack of ability to connect with how things really are.

A. It is interesting to see that the issue of detrending was already addressed in this paper. What was the need for a comment by Ritson, given that?

B. To clarify, are the graphed plots, “reconstructions” or “PC1s”?

C. I think that standardization (division by standard deviation) should be added as another flavor in your work. (Unless it is there and I don’t recognize the name–I am just a civilian who reads blogs and papers for logic, not stats educated.) The Huybers comment is additive to community understanding in that it notes that Mann’s off-center PCA was modified in two manners by Steve M.* He BOTH changes the off-center mean (completely unusual) to centered and he does not standardize, as Mann had. Thus the difference between MM and MBH in that example is not a trial of the issue of off-centering purely, but of two variables. Huybers adds a plot of the properly centered, but still standardized normalization and shows that this result is different then either MBH or MM. Of course, it would be interesting to show all 4 varieties (offcenter/standard=MBH, center/standard=Huybers, center/nonstandard=MM, and offcenter/nonstandard=TCO!) To me, the valuable thing in your simple paper was the clear explanation and easy to follow disaggregations of methodology options. So that we can look at them one by one. In a sense, this little Huybers comment issue is a small example (2by2) of your larger full factorial approach.

D. It’s interesting to me, that it seems like all of your flavors “matter” to some extent. You would think that there would be a few that are especially promoting of differences and a few that have little impact. I guess there is some way to look at this this quantitatively–standard deviation of hockey stick index by variable across the rest of the parameter space or just standard deviation of the curves for a given variable (changing states)?

*Steve don’t get enraged. I really do see this issue more in terms of driving understanding, bringing up new insights, than in terms of any of the 4 flavors being right per se or that there is something wrong that you could not “read Mann’s mind” given the poor description of methods. I do think there is something mildly wrong that you did not at least try the two varieties and note that covariance and correlation made a difference in and off itself (regardless of centering). But that’s no big deal. You still drove some understanding. And then Huybers drove it further. We are all building knowledge here. Well except for Mike and the watermelons. If you did do both the centered covariance and correlation matrices but only published the one that served your purposes more, then I would see that as unethical.

Oh…and sorry to be James Joyce (James) but Steve, I think my 2 by 2 is a more logical way to think about this than your comment a while ago that Burger should have had 3 types of matrices: covariant, correlation and Mannian off-center. It’s really 4! That’s how to think about this. MECE manner. You know us stupid biz consultants. We love that 2 by 2…

#367. TCO, for someone who keeps demanding that I write more papers, I wish that you’d read what we’ve written a little more carefully. The point about covariance and correlation matrices and hteir impact both on the NOAMER PC1 and an MBH-type reconstruction was specifically discussedi n MM05b (the EE article) where we mentioned in section 3:

If the data are not transformed (MM), but the principal components are calculated on the correlation matrix rather than the covariance matrix, the results move part way from MM to MBH, with bristlecone pine data moving up from the PC4 to influence the PC2. In no case other than MBH98 do the bristlecone series influence PC1, ruling out their interpretation as the “”dominant component of variance” [Mann et al, 2004b]

This section canvasses the various alternatives and summarizes in one page pretty much everything that Wahl and Ammann spend 70 pages on. Huybers’ “standardization” is identical to PC using the correlation option. I don’t think that this part of Huybers’ comment added anything and, by not referencing, discussing and distinguishing how, if at all, his views differed from what we’d stated in our previous summary, this section actually confused the debate.

Ok, I skimmed the GRL and EE papers and see what you say. I still thought Huybers paper was useful to understanding, especially as EE paper does not show the differences with standardization and the GRL paper just talks about a transform and just allocates the difference to both changes rather then one by one examination of method options. But I’ll give you 3/4 of a point back.

Now how about the 22 series stuff? Was that always there or was that brought in after the Huybers comment?

On the covariance/correlation, you’re missing the forest for the trees. Our point in that was only that the methods made a difference to results – this is not obvious. In the von Storch-Zorita network with near-perfect pseudoproxies, all the methods produce the same result. The methods matter in the conntext of imperfect proxies, which is why I connect them. If you’re reading robust statistics papers, this is very much in the approach of that field.

We didn’t use a 22-series network in our first paper or we would have reported it. Of the issues raised in the 4 comments (2 printed), the RE matter was really the only worthwhile part of the 4 comments and replies. The others are mostly at cross-purposes to any real point. I object to the description of what we did in our earlier paper as an "error" – it was more of an "existence" proof for spurious RE. I didn’t attempt a full-blown MBH emulation for showing that spurious RE statistics could exist. HOwever, the Reply to Huybers demonstrated this in another circumstance and tightened the concept a lot. It was a really clean and neat reply on this point, which completely dealt with Huybers’ point, COMPLETELY.

I made a proposal on this to Huybers – I offered that he examine our simulations and if he agreed that they dealt completely with his point, that he withdraw and we present a joint paper showing the new simulatons. I hadn’t met him then and I think that he might be more receptive to this type of proposal now. It’s too bad, because there is no outstanding issue any more IMHO.

I still think a lot of your reaction to the Huybers paper is more to perceived debate and damage than it needs to be. He is pretty clear about disaggregating issues and it is completely reasonable for instance that he not deal with CO2 argument. It is actually a bit wandering (or even diverting) that you bring that in when the microscope is being put on the issue of a methodology point. I’m a pretty neutral outsider and sympathetic to you. But I still disagree with confounding issues. Changing two variables when testing one rather than doing OFAT (or Burger full factorial if you really care about the interactions).

The 22 series thing worries me a bit from the very simple “management perspective”. If someone has a mistake in the spreadsheet, that when corrected changes the venture NPV from positive to negative, and then when its found, they go back and make a different change (in effect find another error) that results in the NPV going back to where it was before, that concerns me a bit. Makes me wonder if they are tweaking levers to get a result, makes me wonder if there are 5 more errors there (or levers to tweak that change the result) (I’m not accusing you of anything, blabla…)

Is JohnA dishonest? Yep.
“The whole tone was an attempt to shame Steve into peremptorily deleting the post. It failed. Now you are trying to get Steve to censor my posts (note: nobody else’s just mine).”
Note that I told Steve at lest twice that I did NOT want him to censor JohnA’s posts, and JohnA repeated this accusation after several of those statements. Loka lso at the bottom of tahtthread, where I outline ONE of several examples of JohnA’s intellectual dishoinesty.
Actaully, what I think Steve should do with JohnA is to fire his a**, but if Steve wants to associate with this kind of stuff, its his call. I’ll be happy to judge him on that choice, though.

————-

Is Steve dishonest? Yep.

“#298. Lee,

John A is not a “co-moderator”. This is my blog.

…
Comment by Steve McIntyre “¢’¬? 19 June 2006 @ 11:21 am”
Posted in a thread in which JohnA made the original top post.

—
Actually, I don’t think Steve’s being dishonest here. Just self-deluded. And Steve, before you ding me for ‘taunting’, please reflect on the topic of this particular thread.

#375. Lee, realclimate uses moderation to snuff out scientific discussion. I’ve tried to moderate with a light hand and take pride in not censoring scientific comments like that day. Take a look at John Reid’s suggested rules.

Apparently, Lee, you think the amount of carbon sequestered is ‘just right’. Is the temperature ‘just right’, too?

Has carbon sequestration balanced increasing insolation? Does the rate of sequestration rise with temperature until slowed by a dearth of raw material? Is this what has kept the earth approximately stable? You don’t know.
=============================

I’ve deleted about 10 non-scientific comments mostly pro-climateaudit dating back to implementation of rule changes. There was one adverse comment by Lee. I’ve deleted comments supporting John A, as what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. All are non-scientific and can only lead to more backbiting. Sorry about that, folks, but everyone’s had their say.

Having read some different things in the NAS and Wegman reports than what is said in the advertisement in Scientific American, I like to see a good, open debate on the HS (which is the topic of the SciAm article). One with e.g. Mike Mann on one side of the table and Steve McIntyre on the other side. With people from the WSJ and SciAm in between to keep a safe distance between the two opponents.

Btw, there was a recent opportunity for climate scientists and skeptics for a general debate about global climate change in Europe. The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden hosted a seminar on Global Warming and its controversies. Several climate researchers refused. Their comments can be read here.

In the same post Dr. Mann once again demonstrated his engaging, open-minded and civil approach to scientific debate with one of the more knowledgeable commentators recently on RC (Martin Lewitt).

Some excerpts:

Marin Lewitt…

Michaels views don’t seem out of that out of line with the consensus: “His position is that the climate is becoming warmer, but it will not turn out to be as hot — or its consequences as bad — as some fear.”

Similarly, Taylor of Oregon seems spot on the current state science: “Taylor acknowledges that the Earth is warming but says it is impossible to calculate how much of that is caused by human activity.”

Has anyone calculated how much of that is caused by human activity? In which journals? Using which models? I suspect the mixed GHG proportion is somewhere between 20% and 60%, with internal climate modes and solar variation the leading candidates for the rest. I doubt anyone has made a case for high accuracy in attribution in peer reviewed journals that can stand up to scrutiny.

Dr. Mann’s response…

[Response: You are not even remotely correct in any of the above statements. Natural radiative forcing (solar+volcanic) actually leads to a net cooling over the 20th century, and the remaining (internal) natural variability could not possibly account for the late 20th century warming. Before spouting nonsense, I suggest you at least aquaint yourself with the basics. You might start with the detection and attribution chapter of the IPCC (2001) report. – mike]

Oops. Uh, wrong quote, try this…

Marin Lewitt…

Mike, I not only have read the 2001 attribution section, but also participated in the lastest draft review. Combining solar and volcanic forcings is a red herring, when the question is what proportion increases in solar activity and forcing is responsible for the 20th century warming and particularly the recent warming vis’a’vis anthropogenic GHGs. Solar forcing has increased over the 20th century and given that the oceans have not yet had time to equilibrate to the new levels of forcing, it must have contributed some to the recent warming, in fact, that equlibration was further delayed by the cooling period, so the unrealized climate commitment would have been greater than ordinarily expected given that most of the increase in solar activity occurred in the first half of the century.

Dr. Mann…

[Response: Thats enough of this nonsense. We’ve discussed this ad nauseum in past posts. The trend in natural radiative forcing during the 20th century is negative. If you’ve got something new to add to the discussion, fine. Otherwise, don’t bother posting this stuff. – mike]

Levitt’s points seem quite reasonable. As to Mann’s surly response, imagine the hysteria from Bloom or Lee if they were treated that way. BTW what exactly are we going to believe on this topic from the author of MBH98 Figure 7?

I found this discussion about Dr. Mann’s surly responses. There is more to the story. He chose not to accept my post in response to his dismissive attack. That is not a very scientific way to appear to “win” points. It is not the only time I have been censored on the realclimate.org site. I provide the censored post here for your reference:

Re: response to #31

Mike, if you have evidence that the increase in solar forcing was fully equilibrated before the recent warming, post it. You might want to start with the climate commitment studies:

Real Climate presents all the posts from the cheering choir, but only some of the posts, or worse yet highly edited posts, from people asking questions which are intelligent, but tread to closely to the problems which Mann et al do not want to address.

For a post to appear on RC, it has to be approved by the “team.” Some controversial posts pass muster, but only the “team” knows who many are deleted.

Interesting running commentary with Gavin regarding the ‘benefit’ he (and the other moderators recieve from RealClimate) I’m shadow posting my recent comment, because I do not believe that it will show up.

[Response:But if you think were cheap enough to be bought off with a free server account, try buying us lunch – who knows what well do for that? – gavin]

Speaking of arguing honestly and not misrepresenting the issues. You are conveniently ignoring the value that this site provides you in terms of notoriety and name recognition. That in and of itself is of value, especially to a researcher who is chasing limited research funds. Do you deny that name recognition and notoriety within your field do not play a role in securing grant funding? Are you saying that the publicity that you and the other moderators here have no impact on your name recognition and notoriety? Based on your comments, i.e. the only ‘value’ you get is a free server account and you can’t even get lunch out of the deal, you are ignoring these external benefits that do have intrinsic value to you and the other moderators. That is being dishonest and misrepresenting your interests.

Is it dishonest to continually dodge questions? Maybe that’s more cowardice than dishonesty.

How about making false presumptions in order to misconstrue an argument so that it can be dismissed? That *could* be an honest mistake. How many honest mistakes before it is legitimate to accuse someone of being intentionally dishonest? Or say they NEVER apologize? Is that still just cowardice, or does it tip the balance to possible dishonesty?

One thing that Gavin Schmidt has started doing repeatedly at RC is speculating on motives. That’s not dishonest either. But it sure makes it difficult to discuss emerging science. Skeptics there are routinely portrayed and treated as denialist quacks. That’s not dishonest, I suppose. But it sure is misleading to the public.

It’s really hard to say when someone is being dishonest if what they do is pretend they can’t hear you. That would be dishonest. But it would be hard to prove. My only proof is the pattern of questions that he chooses to answer vs. ignore. He ignores most of the best skeptical questions and answers the quacks. And the time stamps of these two kinds of posts are often very close to each other. Which suggests to me he’s afraid of stirring up controversy by answering the good questions.

Is it honest to assume iid noise when looking to prove a trend?
Is it dishonest to ignore 1/f noise when looking to prove a trend?

Rather than ask if someone is above or below some arbitrary honesty threshold, why not ask if they can do better at disclosing correct information? No question that Gavin could improve in that area; he would probably agree! In the case of a trend analysis, for example, the most honest thing to do would be to explore both options and present them as equal alternatives given the high uncertainty on natural variability. That’s the sort of honesty I think policy people are looking for: maximum disclosure.

I’ve been having just a lovely conversation about the Skeptic article with Gavin over at RC, here. Gavin has necessarily had the last word, for what it’s worth. But anyway, during the conversation an interesting analysis about climate sensitivity to forcing presented itself, which I’ve chosen to post here rather than there. A thread dedicated to Gavin seemed the appropriate venue.

Gavin is on record that the climate sensitivity of Earth is 0.75 C/Wm^-2, here, for example, and elsewhere.* This sensitivity is what gives the predicted ~3 C of climate warming for the 3.7 W/m^2 of forcing brought on by CO2 doubling.

The GISS GCM comes close to this sensitivity, and it is IPCC holy writ. So, from where does it come? This question has been a topic of interest here at CA, and so it seemed worthwhile to bring the following to attention here. Maybe everyone knew all this already, but here it is again anyway.

The TOA solar input is 342 W/m^2, and the TOA radiation temperature of Earth is 255 K. This 255 K is also the temperature Earth surface would exhibit if the atmosphere were purely of transparent oxygen/nitrogen. So, guess what, 255 K/342 W/m^2 = 0.75 C/Wm^-2. An amazing coincidence with GISS normal.

And here’s another: Now, with the present climate, the total solar forcing entering the atmosphere is 235 W/m^2. But we also now have 155 extra W/m^2 of greenhouse forcing and a surface average temperature of 288 K (255 K + 33 K extra due to the greenhouse forcing). And so guess another what: 288 K/(235+155)Wm^-2 = 0.74 C/Wm^-2. Another amazing coincidence with the GISS model and with Gavin’s climate wisdom.

Are these empirical correlations the source of the modelers’ climate sensitivity? Was 0.75 C/Wm^-2 originally derived from first principle climate physics, or was it built in by a simple division of (total K)/(total forcing)? Or derived some other way? Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question.

But anyway, why the modern value of 235 W/m^2 of solar forcing? What happened to that original 342 W/m^2? Well, these days 107 W/m^2 of solar forcing energy is reflected back into space by high clouds (77 W/m^2) and the surface (30 W/m^2). It seems that climate has responded to the increased forcing due to the greenhouse effect of water vapor and CO2 (+ other GHGs) with the result that the solar forcing is reduced to a level so that the 0.75 C/Wm^-2 was maintained. That sounds a lot like Richard Lindzen’s Iris Effect, doesn’t it.

So, we have this interesting dichotomy of climate unadjusted forcing (342 W/m^2 + 155 W/m^2 = 497 W/m^2), and climate adjusted forcing (235 W/m^2 + 155 W/m^2 = 390 W/m^2). It seemed to me that the 3.7 W/m^2 of water vapor enhanced CO2 doubling forcing was really unadjusted forcing. Climate should respond to adjust that forcing just as it has responded to adjust the previous 497 W/m^2.

I wanted to plot unadjusted forcing vs. known temperature, fit the data, and extrapolate it to the effect of an additional unadjusted 3.7 W/m^2 from doubled CO2. But two data points didn’t seem like enough. So, I increased the data set by incorporating the known data for Pluto.

Pluto has little atmosphere and so should reflect an average surface temperature that strictly reflects the incident solar forcing, which is very small (~1/40^2 of Earth). Pluto has a very eccentric orbit, and we have the Hubble Space Telescope, so three values of forcing and three values of surface temperature are knowable: max, min, and median.

Pluto temperatures are from “The Cambridge Planetary Handbook” by Michael E. Bakich, Cambridge University Press, 2000, page 297, and the solar forcings of Pluto were calculated by scaling Earth total solar incident irradiance (1360 W/m^2) by (1/AU^2) for Pluto at its minimum, mid, and maximal distance from the sun. Average solar irradiance for Pluto given by the Handbook was 0.9 W/m^2.

It turned out that these data are well-fit with a 3rd order polynomial in ln(forcing), so T (K) = 50.6 K + a*ln(f) + b*(ln(f))^2+c*(ln(f))^3, where f=forcing in W/m^2 and 50.6 K is the interpolated value of T at 1 W/m^2 (i.e., where ln(f)=0). The coefficients, a-c were not very well constrained, (average coefficient SD = (+/-)40%), probably reflecting the almost over fitting of the data, but anyway a = 22.44, b = – 4.5 and c = 1.14, and the fit r^2=0.999.

But, if we take differences (aka anomalies), all the errors cancel (by the usual climate modeling standard, anyway), and extrapolation of the fit by the 3.7 additional unadjusted W/m^2 from CO2 doubling predicts a climate-adjusted average surface temperature increase of 0.73 C.

This climate-adjusted sensitivity of 0.73 C/3.7 W/m^2 = 0.20 C/Wm^-2 is very similar to what comes from 33 C/155 W/m^2=0.21 C/Wm^-2 implied by the response of climate to GHG forcing when water vapor is present and clouds can form.

Well, the spam filter got me earlier today, so I’ll try one more time. It is strange, to me at least, that all the climate wizzards have not considered the heating effect of the atmosphere, as a consequence of the ideal gas law, PV = nRT. Some calculations say the effect is about 33 C. Interesting.

A planet with an atmosphere and ocean has very different thermal behavior than a planet without one. The thermal conductivity and heat capacity, not to mention albedo, are much higher. Add the Earth’s moon to your model. But don’t use the global average temperature because you haven’t done that for Ceres or Pluto. I’m pretty sure the observed temperature for those objects is for the lit side only unless their rotation rates are very high. There will also be very high variation of temperature and OLR with latitude and longitude on the moon because of the change in solar incidence angle. Not so simple any more.

Re: Pat Frank (#399), Even given that you are doing back-of-the-envelope senstivity calculations in your post, I think they can be done a lot better. The ratio of total thermal radiation to absolute temperature that you compute is not important, given that it is a 4th-order, not linear, relationship. You should be taking the derivative at a given point, and computing the numerical value of that.

Given that the blackblody radiation is E = s * T^4 (where s is usually shown as a lower-case sigma — the Stefan-Boltzmann constant), the derivative dE/dT = 4 * s * T^3. (You can add emissivity terms of ~0.95 if you want — it doesn’t change the overall argument). For your scenarios, you end up with dE/dT values of about 3.8 W m-2 K-1, yielding sensitivities (dT/dE) of about 0.27 K /(W m-2).

Of course, there is a lot more to it than that, but I don’t think there is any way that a 0.75 K /(W m-2) sensitivity can be taken from these numbers.

I won’t try to channel Dr. Ben here and this is still OT for the thread.

Let’s not compare apples and oranges. An airless planet(oid) is a gray body and Stefan-Boltzmann applies. A planet with an IR active atmosphere is not gray. Note that oxygen and nitrogen are not perfectly transparent. Oxygen absorbs strongly in the UV and has a magnetic dipole moment that creates emission/absorption in the microwave band. The oxygen UV absorption creates ozone which has a big peak in the thermal IR at about 1000 cm-1 Both oxygen and nitrogen exhibit Collision Induced Absorption that peaks at about 100 cm-1. It’s weak, but in the absence of CO2 and water vapor, it cannot be ignored. One can use Stefan-Boltzmann to calculate an apparent brightness temperature for a non-gray body, but one cannot expect that T4 applies.

Temperature sensitivity at the bottom of the atmosphere is also not the same as gray body or TOA sensitivity.

Oops, the “3.7 W/m^2 of water vapor enhanced CO2 doubling” above should not include “water vapor enhanced.” The 3.7 W/m^2 is from CO2 doubling alone. I’m so used to writing that bloody phrase these days, it crept right in.

Data from the planetoid Ceres was added to the data set: mean solar irradiance, 178 W/m^2; mean surface temperature, 167 K. Ceres may have a very slight atmosphere, which, if so, must be replenished regularly. The surface temperature is again likely a direct function of solar radiant forcing.

Ceres data fill a space between the data of Pluto and Earth. The same polynomial in ln(f) fit the expanded data set (a=19.0; b=-11.3; c=2.35), with a somewhat worse r^2=0.996. This fit predicted a CO2 doubling anomaly of 1.1 K, and an Earth climate sensitivity of 0.30 C/Wm^-2. Still no alarming prospect here.

Re: #407 — Hi John, with the equation in #399 and the listed data anyone can repeat the fit with a spread sheet program. It’s not at all complicated or worth the hoopla of an account at CA.

It is curious, though, that the 33 K greenhouse divided by the greenhouse “G” of 155 W/m^2 indicates a net average sensitivity of 0.2 C/Wm^-2 for climate as it is now (with hydrology and clouds).

For present climate to show a Gavin/Hansen/IPCC sensitivity of 0.75 C/Wm^-2, an increase of 3.5-fold over the net average, one must infer that climate became increasingly sensitive to forcing as “G” has increased. This is the opposite behavior one would expect from a climate that has emergent dissipative feedbacks.

Re: bender (#410)
I would say audit the hindcasts. I am very sceptical when I look at figures like this where the hindcast is off by a whopping 0.2 degC for the decades centered on 1910 and 1945. Sure the actual temps are within the spread of the models but the net effect of the error is to dramatically reduce the temperature trend from 1910 to 1940. IOW – there is a 30 year trend in the data which is NOT explained by the models yet the IPCC claims the trend from 1960 is “most likely” the result of GHGs. Sorry – does not compute. The trend from 1910 has to be explained before any probability can be assigned to the trend from 1960. Can anyone say LTP?

Re: Raven (#411), Arctic warming in the 1930s was something they never did explain, and I note that arctic sea ice was hitting low levels in the early 1040s as well. This is why I think there may be something to the idea of ocean-related LTP. Gavin Schmidt dodges all questions on this topic, preferring, often, to try to discredit the asker. Why dodge and dismiss if the issue is so easily answered?

Re: John Lang (#409), that post is a textbook example of a straw man argument. Our host has asked for for a comprehensive, lenghty, engineering-quality exposition of how a doubling of atmospheric C02 can lead to n degrees of warming. RC says there is no simple, short, engineering answer to the question of how a doubling of atmospheric C02 can lead to n degrees of warming.

When stated this way it is clear they don’t answer Mr. McIntyre’s question at all. The way they’ve worded it makes it seem so because they use the word “engineer” in their purported answer. Note they never mention this blog or its author at all so they can claim that it’s not an answer to it at all if pressed on the subject. A cheesy rhetorical trick worthy of a high school debate society.

For Pluto the temperatures were the global average at the maximum, median, and minimum insolation. The orbital period of Pluto is 248 years, and so it spends long times near these points — long enough to come to some sort of quasi-equilibrated average temperature.

I don’t think you will ever see an “engineering study,” because I think many of the CO2/AGW proponents are realizing that they have created a perpetuum mobile. The left-hand side of the radiation cartoons makes sense, because it (at least partially) includes convection, conduction, and radiation. But the right-hand side of the cartoons ar an almost isolated system that considers only radiation. This is the only “science” I know of that discusses energy transfer only in terms of radiation. The rest of us have to consider conduction and convection (the really big one). We also have to make sure we don’t have a net decrease in entropy, which would result from those cartoons. No wonder they are hiding behind models.

Re: Jaye (#421), I am not saying that there will be more/stronger due to AGW. I am just saying if there were more/stronger they would have to impact temperature. We are currently in a more active Atlantic hurricane cycle prediction that has nothing to do with AGW. Also it appears we are entering or in a period of decreasing global temperature. Which is the driver and which is the driven I have no clue.

Big surprise, it didn’t. imagine victims with a strike through in the above. Super and sub are nice additions to the Quicktags, but I don’t understand why we can’t use some other HTML features like strike through.

Big surprise, it didn’t. imagine victims with a strike through in the above. Super and sub are nice additions to the Quicktags, but I don’t understand why we can’t use some other HTML features like strike through.

#424 — Curt, Carl in #427 is correct. The linear ~0.75 C/Wm^-2 quotient I showed in #399 was just to point out the interesting coincidence with the sensitivity quoted by Gavin Schmidt, Jim Hansen, and the IPCC. The natural log fit to the total forcing vs T data was, of course, non-linear.

“I didn’t bother reading Pat’s paper, but I know the pattern. Please Pat, stop it. Stop taking punches like a palooka. Go to Steve Mosher and have him salve your bloody face. I’ll hold off Gavin with a Bessel function, so he doesn’t hit you any more.

“P.s. Ever notice how Steve McI doesn’t comment on this sort of thing. Just lets the carnage go on. It’s so obvious (as with Loehle) that he’s not going to back up nincompoops. But doesn’t want to call them out, either. Since they’re “on his side”.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TCO apparently sources the same font of revelation as Gavin, which provides truth in the absence of knowledge. He also seems to agree with Gavin that there can be no physical meaning to an asymptotic intercept of a log plot.

Presumably the “[Intervention]” was Gavin deleting TCO’s more colorful opinions. Whatever they may have been they weren’t as offensive to Gavin as Jerry Browning’s comments, for which Gavin banned Jerry from RC. As a guess, I’d suspect that the reason for the disparate benefice is that, in a true example of his very false canard directed at Steve M. (and Craig Loehle, for that matter), TCO’s comments were in fact “on [Gavin’s] side,” in contrast to Jerry’s very powerful arguments detailing the failure of GCMs to model the upward cascade of enstrophy.

Re: Pat Frank (#430), Well, how nice. To have TCO call me a “nincompoop” is so special. It is a much more high-fallutin sort of insult. I would love to see a paper by TCO sometime, to give me an idea what “Real” scientists do.

Who’d have thought it. Gavin is a mystic, a computer mystic even. His most recent post at RC claims that climate sensitivity is somehow an “emergent” quality of GCM’s. How it “emerges” apparently cannot ever be explained, at least not in a way that is understandable to the uninitiated.

Admittedly I only have 35 years experience of computer programming, but I have never seen anything “emerge” from a program that wasn’t put there by somebody, and if that somebody did not understand what he was doing, I would strongly recommend not using that program.

I never did understand TCO, Craig. I’m not sure how long you’ve been reading this blog, but he was around here much more often “in the beginning.” His opinions seem to be somewhat schizophrenic, bouncing from pointed/dead-on, to meaningless/irrelevant. He’s a hard read.

#432 and 433 — TCO did air many acute comments when he was posting at CA. But he also tended to be mercurial and prickly. He didn’t take well to contradiction and was easily roused to an abusive fury. He took a bit of a dislike to me awhile back when we had a difference of views here at CA, and so it’s not too surprising that he’d be critical on RC. Still, his apparent antipathy toward Steve M. is a surprise and the comment directed at you, Craig, was completely gratuitous and unjustified. Still, I was glad to be included in such good company. 🙂

Gavin, at the end, was reduced to the scientifically spurious criticism that the asymptotic intercept of a log plot is physically meaningless because ln(0) is mathematically undefined, and so there isn’t any reason to continue the debate with him. He’ll have the last word on RC no matter what, and it’s better sooner than later.

Still, his apparent antipathy toward Steve M. is a surprise and the comment directed at you, Craig, was completely gratuitous and unjustified. Still, I was glad to be included in such good company.

TCO was never able to forgive Steve M for not explaining his differences with the HS methodologies at a technical level that would allow TCO to make a judgment on the issue as an expert reviewer of scientific papers – as TCO touted himself and his talents. TCO, although obviously lacking the technical wherewithal, thought of himself as a man of such native intelligence and savvy in these matters that he advised Steve M on an almost continuous basis. I think TCO’s comments at CA had much to say about TCO and the fact that his comments/opinions are given the light of day at RC, where moderation tends to be strict, says much about RC.

You hit the nail on the head, Pat. However, his treatment of Steve is not a surprise to me. He got bent out of shape over a few minor quibbles then just went off the deep end as I recall. Btw, I read your Skeptic paper finally (nobody linked to it that I could find, ahem). Good read. I find it curious, however, that Shermer has not poked his head into all this mess more than he has. I think, perhaps, he realizes it’s tough path to go down.

^Ernie: they’ll swear over there it’s just the group that hosts the site, nothing more. Another for bender’s list of double standards, probably. Any time you align yourself, innocently or otherwise, with any sort of activist organization, questions of credibility/honesty are always bound to appear.

#436 — Mark, thanks for your interest and compliment, and the article is freely available on the Skeptic web site. I can only admire Michael Shermer, and am happy to here express my gratitude to him. He published even though feeling qualms about the validity of the analysis. His reviewers panned the article, while mine generally passed it. One of MS’s reviewers wrote that he’d only be embarrassed by publication, and the other wrote it showed evidence of scientific misconduct (a meritless charge, and I wrote a detailed reply to each review). MS is also on record supporting AGW.

So, by his lights he took a big risk publishing. So far as I can see, he published purely from an ethical obligation to full and honest debate, and found a way to encourage that debate in Skeptic by co-publishing Tapio Schneider’s article and making both available without charge. That’s all very admirable. It seems to me he has no real obligation to enter into the debate itself.

As a little experiment I tried posting on RealClimate (on the Mountains and Molehills thread), pointing out that I was a highly experienced and well qualified scientist who was less than entirely convinced by the AGW orthodoxy. Unsurprisingly I got somewhat flamed. So I posted a polite and fairly detailed reply, which simply disappeared into Gavin’s erratic censorship device. No explanation why, and it was far more on topic than most of the thread.

Continuing my experiment I used another account (FredB) to post a snide personal attack on myself. This was swiftly approved, despite contravening RealClimate’s stated policies. No surprise there then.

I sent in a third post pointing out this out. Deathly silence.

Any lingering doubts I had about RealClimate’s honesty have been completely dispelled.

Well done. I noticed your comment #219 and even remarked upon it at Watts Up. I also noticed Fred B’s comment at #295, and of course never saw anything more from you. Now, I’ve seen this, and you’ve made my day. I’ve even commented on this little story over at Watts Up.

I’ve never had the urge to comment at Real Climate, but I tried for awhile at Tamino. More than anything what irritated me about his editing is that my responses after an initial comment were selectively allowed. A conversation in which the comments of one party are erratically posted is corrupted.
==============================================

They spent more time on your supposed qualifications as a published scientist. Potentially catastrophic global warming! Whoa, moving from established fact to shaky, that must be some interesting evidence.

lol, I can see the news stories now.

Oxford Professor Discusses Potential: Fact or Fiction?

Dr. Karen Jonathan, with degrees in Botany and Mechanical Engineering, details the journey that took her from seeing potential nuclear war as a fact to one of murky pseudo-evidence, betrayal and hallucinogenic double-speak. Follow her as she walks the back streets and alleys of Milan, Paris, Etobicoke, Minsk, Helsingfors and Grand Forks, gathering clues and establishing the sometimes excellent points the denialists about war using atomic weapons lucked upon during their uninformed blundering. “Evidence, and not spin, is the trust of science. While certainly knaves, jesters and fools exist, the potential of catastrophe sometimes isn’t fact. Sometimes it is simply a cigar.”

No reply from Jonathan (219) I see – I guess all the real scientists round here scared him off!

Jonathan, your experiment proved the point rather emphatically. It also illustrated rather prettily a variation on total blocking that Gavin sometimes uses: sometimes he’ll let one post through and than then “disappear” any efforts to support the original post, leaving the impression that the original poster had left the field in disarray – as you so neatly satirized.

This post originated out of Gavin’s failure to let me even comment on an RC post trashing Ross and I – a failure at odds with the stated policies of their blog. As we observed previously, “Bulldogs have lesser dogs”,… and I’ve probably received as much criticism at other blogs for the temerity in holding Gavin to account on this issue as any other matter.

Given that RC is often the principal source of information on NASA GISS viewpoint and Gavin obviously blogs at work, these practices are even more disquieting. (I don’t mind him blogging at work since his supervisors approve of it; my objection is that the failure to observe policies that would apply to NASA-supported activities.)

I found long ago that posting at RC was a waste. They deleted posts that were not even overly critical. If an audit was done of the deleted posts, we would find that almost scandalous. Maybe they do not have enough memory.(bad bites).

I am very neutral on climate change and am just trying to get some information and happened upon real climate. I am not a geologist, but have an undergraduate degree in geology. I noticed where frequent posters were extremely belligerent to geologists because most of them seem to be somewhat skeptical of global warming. I think this is because of how geologists are trained to think, which is to take a very long term approach and not jump to rash conclusions. One very ugly fellow, Ray Ladbury posted something like “The guy’s a frigging geologist – what does he know about climate change ?” and went on to basically disparge a whole scientific discipline. A week or so later, he made a comment on the same blog where he made reference to geology ( plate tectonics ). Noticing a lack of visceral responses from the anti GW crowd, I tried a simple little experiment to see if Real Climate was a truly open discussion forum or a propaganda site. I replied, almost verbatim to the original post by Ray Ladbury basicaly saying “You’re no friggin’ geologist, what do you know about plate tectonics”. I guess I wasn’t really surprised that my comment was never posted.

I’ve also noticed that their willingness to delete critical posts is inversely proportional to the world temperature. It wasn’t this bad last year. But now it is almost as terrible as in Climate Progress.

I’ve asked Gavin several things and he’s quite honest about using best guesses. To journalists though he always implies a certainty that isn’t warranted if you are guessing. It seems that if there is a stated range of possible input values, climate modelers tend to assume a gaussian and use a value near the middle. But these ranges are really only just two guessed limit values so that assumption isn’t in the least valid. For aerosols that range is vast and Schwartz’s papers tell us clearly that every value is as likely as any other and they just don’t know which is correct. Hence, I asked Gavin if they did a real sensitivity analysis, ie testing to the full extents of the input ranges. His reply was that doing that wouldn’t be useful. Yet it’s not meant to be useful – it’s a standard test that provides a proper uncertainty range. It’s not difficult to see that such an uncertainty range would be huge, much large than the IPCC admits, and including massive heating and cooling scenarios. Schwartz seems quite panicky though about the possibility of a huge masking aerosol effect which is why he did that work to pin down the CO2 sensitivity.

Oddly this gaussian distribution assumption seems to be used only on sparse, preselected data or model outputs where it is rarely an appropriate assumption. It never seems to apply to the actual area where it may be a correct assumption – ie on large amounts of error-prone data. Instead they like to just ignore or adjust data if they don’t like it or even look for a new metric that shows what they expect to see.

This sort of reply is so familiar, it’s predictable. Maybe JamesG could link to the original exchange for fuller context?

> Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any
>> way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful
>> about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to
>> answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other
>> hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself.
>> We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or
>> not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any
>> comments you’d like us to include.
>>
>> You’re also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as
>> a resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put
>> forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We’ll use
>> our best discretion to make sure the skeptics dont’get to use the RC
>> comments as a megaphone…
>>
>> mike

Another pearl pried from the deep. A luminous comment on the real climate of discourse. An Olympic Gold for synchronized commenting. Is there any limit to this team’s accomplishments when they breathe together?
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